


The Drowning Wasps

by llethe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers Family, Big Damn Heroes, Bucky Barnes-centric, Dark Natasha Romanov, Dark Steve Rogers, Descriptions of physical and psychological torture, Disability reversal, Friendship, Gen, Major Character Injury, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Reunited and It Feels So Good, SHIELD Agent Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicide, Whump, interpersonal violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-09-27 05:07:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 308,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17155862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llethe/pseuds/llethe
Summary: “The sound of your laugh,” he doesn't say. “Talking to you,” he doesn’t say. “Having this,” he doesn’t say.  “Taking your face off my wall,” he doesn’t say.One year after the events of Kill Strike Trigger, HYDRA implements a new technology that threatens to end the world. As SHIELD and the Avengers fight to avert a looming global catastrophe, they find themselves fighting for something else, something bigger: death, love, hate, war, each other.A Captain America/MCU novel about what is gained and what is lost.





	1. The Joy of Painting

**Author's Note:**

> Description: This is a sequel series to Kill Strike Trigger. It breaks from MCU canon after The Winter Soldier and takes nothing from Age of Ultron, Civil War, and Infinity War canon. It becomes and remains Avengers-heavy near the midpoint with a strong tilt toward SHIELD-based shenanigans. Some liberties have been taken. One colorful part of the series that doesn't become specifically named/acknowledged until the end follows comic canon instead of MCU canon.
> 
> Author's Notes: 
> 
> (0) Edited to add: In line with the vague note about the "colorful part of the series" above, the Chapter 17 endnote specifically explains the discrepancy. I'd explain it here, but it's a spoiler. What I'll say here is that MCU changed the color after I'd gotten pretty far into writing the series circa 2016/2017 and had incorporated the comic color into the imagery and foreshadowing.
> 
> (1) For some of the tags that can often be deal breakers: I love these characters and will not leave them in a dark place. When they go to dark places, it's respectful and not more graphic than it needs to be.
> 
> (2) The series is 95% gen/friendship. Chapter 1 is not indicative of the focus of the rest of the series, besides Bucky and Steve forever.
> 
> (3) I've been writing this monster since February 2016, before Civil War, before Infinity War, before whatever’s next - it's DONE. Enjoy (I hope you do).
> 
> (4) Thank you to all of those who commented on, bookmarked, rec'd, and kudos'd Kill Strike Trigger. Many of you--I think you know who you are--have been incredible, continual supports as I meandered through this series, nearly giving up on it and MCU more times than I'll admit. Genuinely, thank you. 
> 
> Here we go.
> 
> Author's Plea: If you haven't read Kill Strike Trigger (KST), this series will make absolutely no damned sense. This series doesn't build on KST: it is entirely about KST. Please read KST first!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was May 9, 2015: just over a year since Project Insight brought SHIELD to its knees, and just over three months since the last time Bucky pulled a knife on Steve.

It was May 9, 2015: just over a year since Project Insight brought SHIELD to its knees, and just over three months since the last time Bucky pulled a knife on Steve. On his laptop back home in DC, Steve had a Firefox tab open for Expedia, a finger tap away from buying a cheap Lufthansa ticket back to Europe, one-way.

He’d had him. He’d fucking _had him_.

“—grid. Steve? You with me?”

Steve blinked and crossed his arms over his chest, not at all defensive. Some stupid excuse was on the tip of his tongue—of course he’d heard her—but Natasha saw straight through him, and he didn’t dare try to convince her otherwise.

“He’s off grid,” Natasha repeated. “That’s a good thing.”

Steve huffed out a laugh, and she probably saw through that, too. “Or HYDRA’s got’em,” he said, the thought somehow not solvent until it left his tongue. His stomach dropped, a trap door giving way into –

“HYDRA does _not_ have him. Steve.” She worked to catch his eyes. “He’s still coming down. Trust me. Okay?”

He still did – trust her. One of the few. Which is why he felt comfortable admitting, “I’m thinking about going back over there. I shouldn’t’ve let him go.”

This time, Steve saw through Natasha – but only because of the way her face fell, because of the way she held her breath a second too long, because of the way her eyes froze. He instantly regretted ratting himself out; it’d’ve been far, far better to have her find out while he was halfway across the Atlantic.

“He’s putting two halves of a life together. There are cracks, Steve.  He did you a favor.”

Even though he heard the uncharacteristic waver in her voice, and even though he saw the hesitation written all over her face and body language, and even though he heard her—loud and fucking clear—he was revolted.

A favor.

Something harsh and unforgiving crawling toward the tip of his tongue, Steve didn’t get a chance to say it, not when Tony walked in.

It’d been a gullible dream to have ever thought Tony wouldn’t start right in. “Welcome back, Cap. Heard he pulled a knife on you. A+ friend.”

Steve turned a hard glare Natasha’s way, more surprised by her loose lips than he should be. She, of course, didn’t dare look contrite. She only lifted a shoulder at him.

A hot, burning feeling rippled through him, chasing the moment when he realized: he didn’t like these people. He hadn’t chosen these people. He couldn’t trust these people.

These fucking people.

He was going to catch the Amtrak back home, tap the button on his Firefox tab, and fly out tomorrow morning at 0900. He was going to re-find the only person in this world worth a damn, and he was going to drag him home, no matter the cost.

“Steve, I—” Tony.

Steve met Tony’s eyes and said a simple, “Goodbye, Tony.”

If Tony sputtered a response (only in Steve’s imagination would Tony be flustered enough to sputter anything), Steve didn’t hear it. If Natasha said a word, Steve didn’t care to hear it.

He didn’t hear the elevator _ding_ , didn’t hear its soft _whoosh_ as it descended dozens of floors, and didn’t hear a damn single thing beyond that until, pounding down the sidewalk, shouldering through New York throngs of people, car horns barely registering, he heard, “You wanna get a drink?”

He knew the voice: the nurse across the hall of his old apartment. Natasha called her Sharon.

Steve didn’t know why he ducked into the nearest storefront’s entryway, or why he stopped to talk to her, but he did both.

Face to face, in a small space made smaller by his large frame, he let his bad mood talk for him. “With you? Not really.”

Sharon looked to be an easy mark: too easily surprised by the rebuke. Then, her expression steeled. “I was doing my job.”

He resisted the urge to step forward deeper into her space. “I’m not your damned job.”

Sharon nodded, lips pushed together. “No, you’re not. Sorry I asked.”

She melted back onto the sidewalk, nearly disappearing into the mass of people. An instinct, a thought, a _something_ told him that watching her go was a mistake.

An old voice, not his own, ricocheted inside his head: _Christ, Steve, you don’t have to burn the world because HYDRA did._

His own voice followed with _shut up, Buck_.

“Hey.”

Sharon stopped, and he quickly trotted her way. 

Face to face with her, a person he barely knew, something strange happened: his shoulders relaxed, and some of his bitter, angry tension unraveled. “How about that drink.

Her response was immediate and prepared. “You’re buying.”

Steve lead her to an old bar down the street. Back in the day—how laughable was that—it’d been a bar, easily recovering into a booming business after the end of Prohibition. By the time he and Bucky could drink, the place had become legendary.

That day, it was more of a restaurant than a bar. The name on the front of the building was different, but the floors were the original, refinished wood; the bar was the same dark mahogany; and the upper tier of horizontal windows near the ceiling were the same colorful stain glass.

Steve held the door open for her; if she rolled her eyes, he pretended not to see. He followed her to the bar, where she swiftly sat before he could pull her chair out.

“Chivalry’s dead,” she commented.

In no mood for yet another argument today, Steve scooted up beside her. “Apparently.”

The service was quick, drink orders taken within seconds and delivered within mere minutes.

Sharon pulled a glass tumbler of something dark toward her. “Looks like you’ve had a bad day.”

Steve stared down at his stout glass of amber-colored Scotch and huffed out a laugh. “‘A bad day.’”

Try a bad five years, with something around sixty-five before that.

That old voice sniped, _Pity yourself much?_

_Shut up._

“What?” Sharon asked – as if he’d said that out loud.

Oh. He might’ve.

Steve took a sip of his drink—he’d had better—and avoided looking over at her. “It’s been hard. He’s out there.”

It occurred to Steve that Sharon didn’t know who _he_ was. That she probably didn’t know anything about Bucky, or about the last few months of trying to find him – of how that ended up.

“My aunt—great aunt, actually—spoke of him. Said she wished they’d gotten along better. She said it was the strangest feeling, how she expected you all to die but never saw it coming when you did. She warned me about that when I joined SHIELD.”

Ever since the serum, Steve’s body didn’t do unexpected things. Muscles didn’t spasm. Bones didn’t ache. His heart didn’t skip. Not usually.

Steve turned his attention from his drink and to Sharon. He saw that she was still looking down at hers, hands and shoulders tense. She wasn’t breathing, even though he knew that she knew better.

“You’re Peggy’s niece.”

Sharon nodded, slow. “There’s a chance to set the world right, the way she always wanted. Do you need help finding him again?”

 _Set the world right._ A nice thought.

Steve dragged an answer from his throat. “He doesn’t want to be found.”

Maybe Bucky was gone, to anywhere, nowhere in the world. Maybe that plane ticket was meant for Steve to get lost, to also not want to be found.  Maybe Natasha was right.

Natasha.

A well of anger boiled up inside of him, and he let it. “How intentional is this? _You_?”

Sharon smiled, lips twisting around the lip of the glass. She didn’t wince with the taste of the alcohol. “Do you trust _any_ of us?”

That was a good question. He thought he did, especially after Insight. But then –

The easy answer was “no.” It fueled a stronger feeling than the one he’d felt when Bucky’d drawn a knife and walked away.

It wasn’t them. It was him. It was Bucky. It was the past year. It was the world not fucking _bending_ the way he knew it could.

“I’m not intentional. This time.” Sharon looked over at him, blue eyes not kind. “There are very few ways to right the world. You know that.”

Steve glanced at the clock above the bar: twenty minutes until his train back to DC left. A laptop waiting for a finger tap on the button for a one-way ticket to Europe. Bucky: somewhere out there, a sliver of the world drifting further away with every tick of the clock.

“SHIELD was never right,” Steve said, also not kind. “Hiring Zola? _Really_?”

He pushed his glass away and stood up, the wooden legs of his chair screeching across the creaky wood floor. He threw a wad of cash onto the bar and ignored the errant penny that _clanged_ to the ground.

After three long steps made toward the door, her voice caught up to him.

“We can make it right. Give him something to come back to.”

That should have upset him. He should have told her that she had no idea what she was talking about, and he should have kept walking: to the train, to his laptop, to the airport.

Instead, he turned back around, and that voice, that old, annoying voice, prodded him: _look, she has a point_. _Stop being a fucking twit._

His heart ached to hear that voice.

“I’ll think about it,” Steve said, and then offered her a nod.

“Think fast.”

Steve left, a fucking twit committed to thinking real fucking slow about it.

*** 

The thing about “jogging” with Steve was that Steve’s idea of “jogging” was Sam’s idea of a brisk run.

“You want to go back to Europe?” Sam wheezed. His thighs burned, calves twitched, lungs ached. Before Captain America burst into his life like the fucking Kool Aid Man on speed, Sam _liked_ running. Figured he’d been good at it. “You don’t know if he’s still there.”

He didn’t say: the person Steve still wanted to find was toxic as shit and better left to some desolate, unknown corner of the world. He didn’t say: your friend didn’t survive them, and I’m sorry for that.

“I’m not asking you to come,” Steve said, annoyed and showing it.

“Good. I’m asking you not to go.”

Steve jogged to a dead halt, stepping off the concrete path. Dread in his veins, Sam followed in kind, waiting for the person that the media didn’t talk about: pissed off, shitty Steve Rogers on a tear.

“What if it was Riley?” Steve charged.

“I’d know when to let him go.”

“You say that.”

Sam should have been angry. He should have yelled at Steve for going too far while too blind. He decided on something worse. “I was there, man. I heard the words that came out of his mouth.”

“He’s _sick_ ,” Steve said, every single part of him oozing disappointment.

Sam almost, _almost_ felt bad. He’d never tell Steve that he so much wished HYDRA’s dirty secret was still frozen in some base, never to be discovered, so the rest of them could move on.

Steve looked down, off to the side, and heaved out a giant breath. When he looked back up, there was something different in his expression. Vulnerability, maybe.

“Nat says he’s off grid. What if he’s dead? What if HYDRA has him? What if he—put a gun in his mouth. I can’t just—” Another giant breath. “I can’t sit back and wait to find out.”

Sam sighed and internally acknowledged, maybe, that he didn’t know what it was like. That was especially why Steve should have _listened_.

“He’s not giving you that choice.  As hard as it is, it’s not something we can control – or change.  He’ll—” Sam held his nose and made himself say it.  “He’ll come around when he’s ready.”

Steve turned away before Sam could catch his reaction. “I’ll see you around.”

Steve walked, and Sam took too long to find his words. He finally came up with, “If you’re gonna do something, just call me first, okay?”

Steve didn’t respond, but Sam was pretty sure he was still in earshot when Sam breathed, “You fucking asshole” – not referring to Steve. 

***

Only three days later, Sharon rapped on the door to Steve’s apartment. Steve closed the lid to his laptop—another tab in Firefox opened to another click-away from a flight to Europe—and trotted to the door.

In Sharon’s hand, a hefty bottle of Jim Beam hung by its stem. Steve popped his eyebrows at it. “You’re not messing around.”

She shrugged. “I can’t paint. Figured I’ll need the inspiration.”

Somehow, he doubted that. He also doubted her as one to drink. It was for show, a cover, a step from a lie.

 _Relax_. Steve didn’t know if that was his voice or the made-up, imaginary-friend one. Didn’t know if it mattered anymore.

Steve stepped aside. “After you.”

She set her bottle of liquor down on an out-of-the-way tabletop. “What made you stay?”

Word traveled fast.

Steve stepped by her, picked up the bottle, and carried it into the kitchen. He put it next to a growing collection of microbrews and IPAs from Sam and a few other bottles of harder, more potent liquors. None of them did much for him, except help him feel like a scrawny kid desperately trying to be something more.

On his way back into the foyer/living room, he stopped to lean in the doorframe of the kitchen. Her back to him, Sharon admired—or, at least, pretended to admire—his built-in bookshelf and collection of “historical” books.

“Haven’t decided yet,” Steve admitted, part truth, part bait. A little something he’d learned well from Natasha.

Sharon’d learned it from someone else. Someone familiar. Still admiring those books, Sharon commented, “Oh? How about we go?”

Coming from her, the entire damn thing sounded ridiculous. That was the point.

Tongue stuck between top and bottom incisors, Steve looked down at the hardwood floor. “You know, in my head, he’s still in the old town by the boxcars. Waiting.”

Sharon turned around, arms crossed, feet planted square. It struck him that she was all but a stranger – but, oddly enough, someone he felt as though he’d known for a long time.

“He’s long gone,” Steve added. He didn’t need to say “to anywhere else in the world,” or “to somewhere I’ll never find,” or “hopefully still alive.”

“When you’re lost, you stay put,” Sharon said, “and let help find you. He knows where to find you.”

Steve crunched his eyebrows together. “Am I lost?”

“You seem like it.”

“He’s alive,” Steve explained, as if that explained it all. Maybe she’d understand – more than Sam, more than Natasha, more than any of them. “And it was him.”

Sharon didn’t understand. “That’s why he’ll find you.”

Steve had read the file and learned enough to know that throwing that file into a burning fire wouldn’t be enough to exorcise the sins. Steve knew Bucky: enough of him left for Steve to know that Bucky wouldn't dare come near this place. Near Steve.

It’d been three months since Poland. Three months since Bucky’d used Steve’s shield to kill HYDRA soldiers, to save Sam’s life – and then run away as fast and as far as he could. Three months since Bucky could have come home.

That bottle of liquor sounded good. Useless, impotent, but good.

Sharon jerked her head toward two 8x10, white canvas-stretched frames on the floor. “How about that painting lesson?”

Right. The one she’d asked for him over text two days ago. He wanted to know how she got his number, but, then again, didn’t need to ask. Natasha liked to meddle.

“Sure.”

They sat on the floor with a tray of paint, a glass of water, and a bowl of brushes between them. “Teaching” how to paint didn’t happen, so much as the two of them attacking their respective canvases with neither a plan nor an idea about the final product.

After a while, Sharon commented, “You don’t seem like you’re here.”

That was fair. “He’s out there. And I’m here,” Steve gestured toward his ugly canvas, “doing this.”

Sharon made an “mmm” noise and swirled her paint brush between drops of white and red paint. Wide stripes of gradient red and oranges swiped across her canvas – a sunset, maybe. _Maybe_.

“What’s the last thing he wanted you to do?” Sharon quickly clarified, “When he was still him.”

Steve didn’t need to think hard. He remembered a vicious conversation—well, vicious only in hindsight—that revolved around two points: _they’re never gonna let you go_ and _we’re gonna go home_. “You’re SSR’s puppet,” Bucky’d said but never, not once, said, “I bought you art school, idiot.”

Steve looked at his own aimless canvas. It was filled with abstract swipes of runny, drab colors, a form of erratic art that he’d never enjoyed making.

“Whatever it is, maybe it would help you move forward.”

That wasn’t possible – a kneejerk thought told him.

The intercom next to the door buzzed. That would be call-ahead takeout he’d ordered. Steve almost didn’t hear it, not as his thoughts swirled around _art school_ : the brightest colors, the best paint, the most beautiful canvas.

Those thoughts reminded him of an empty road near the Adirondacks, encircled by glittering golds, rosy reds, glistening yellow-oranges, and so many shades in between, with a backdrop of a deep blue sky and white clouds that rolled on by. Time held still that day.

 _Well, doesn’t that beat all._ Never a question, always a grin and a low-key drawl, because Bucky Barnes was going to take the world. _Go paint something beautiful, Steve._

***

 August, 2015. Stark Tower. High up and deep inside, Steve and almost the rest of the Avengers sat around a long, shiny, wood conference table.

Steve caught Sharon’s eye by chance, and she smiled at him with her eyes and a tight, nearly imperceptible tug of the corners of her lips. Whatever they were, or whatever they were becoming, he liked it.

He let the eye contact drop and turned his attention to a Stark-issued tablet. All said: he didn’t remember why they were meeting today. He didn’t know why Maria was here, or why she needed Tony, and Rhodes, and Natasha, and Bruce, and Sharon, and Steve himself here for it. He didn’t remember why Sam wasn’t invited, or if Sam had been and told Maria “hell no.” He knew Barton wasn't ever coming back, not after April 2014, and he figured Thor had more important things to do than bicker with them over -- whatever this was going to be about.

“Welcome, everyone,” Maria greeted.

Even those two words confirmed to Steve that he was doing the right thing. For now. The right thing for now.

On his tablet, Steve dutifully flipped through the digital pages, catching Maria’s spoken words here and there, but his eyes blurring the written words into jumbles of gibberish. After a minute, he decided against reading it.

He opened the sketching program, leaned back in his chair, looked at Maria, and drew her jaw line.

Maria spoke. Tony interjected. Rhodes rolled his eyes. Natasha shook her head. Bruce smiled, the way he did when he wanted to be pleasantly surprised but hadn’t been.

Steve drew Maria’s ears and sketched out her eyes and nose.

Maria raised her hand and aimed a black device at the holographic wall screen. Steve glanced at it and saw a graph. Tony asked if she’d done that in Word, maybe needed some clipart to really make it pop.

Steve started on Maria’s hair: quick swipes for the bangs, tighter lines for the stern bun.

The rest of them talked and discussed, went over certain pages, argued points. It sounded civil, and that was really all Steve heard of it: the tones. He kept his eyes on Maria, back and forth between her and his tablet. He didn’t notice Natasha watching him.

“Captain Rogers, you’ve been quiet. What do you think?” Sharon.

Steve heard his name more than anything, and he knew that he was finally up. He raised his free hand and muttered “hold on.”

The lines weren’t sharp enough. He finished up some rough shading, some half-assed blurring, and a bit of sharpening. It wasn’t done, but it was identifiably Maria.

“Steve, c’mon,” Rhodes pushed, impatient. “You don’t have to read the whole thing to have an opinion.”

Steve looked up and flipped his tablet around for all to see. “I’m going to art school next month.”

Every single one of them leaned forward, each caught in various stages of surprise, except for Sharon and Natasha. Sharon’d known the whole time, and nothing got by Natasha. He tried not to laugh.

Maria tossed the clicker onto the table, crossed her arms, and sighed _loudly_. “Really. Are any of you taking this seriously?”

“Yeah, Bob Ross. Are you?” Tony: all shit, all the time. For not the first time, Steve considered how exhausting it was to catch up, jab back, play along, and try to keep the peace—and the pace. “I don’t think the afro would really suit your face.”

“ _Tony_ ,” Rhodes admonished, the ever-ineffective keeper of Tony’s tantrums.

Steve flipped the tablet closed, slid it to the center of the table, and stood up. He pointed his index finger at Tony, and, as lightheartedly as he could manage, said, “I don’t know who that is. But I’ll find out at art school.”

Before he left, Natasha caught his eyes. Her small smile and accompanying nod gave him power where he hadn’t realized it was needed.

All the way to the elevator, he picked up snippets of discussion.

“Is he for real?”

“Did he just _quit_?”

“What if we need him?”

“What if he’s happy for once?”

It wasn’t like he was leaving the planet. If anything happened, he’d still be here – and willing, of course. Natasha knew. Sharon did, too.

Steve stepped into the elevator car and pressed “G.” When the doors closed, something lifted off his shoulders. Something.

He half-expected the elevator to stop in the middle of the building, for Tony to pull some sort of stunt using JARVIS. The elevator slid smoothly to the ground floor and opened its doors without a blip of hesitance.

Three steps toward the building’s entrance, Tony’s voice carried down the hallway.

“Is this because of Barnes?”

Steve spun around, his calm happiness evaporating into thin air. He waited for Tony to catch up before stepping deep into his space. “I don’t know, Tony. Is he here?”

Tony stepped forward, face angled up. “Why don’t you try dealing with your shit, instead of leaving the rest of us hanging. This work is important. And you’re gonna go to _art school_? Draw titties with the teenagers? There’re laws against that, by the way. Wasn’t sure if you knew. Heads up.”

If Tony was red-hot anger, Steve was white-hot, the type of heat that felt cold but blistered through skin.

“I don’t owe you anything,” Steve said, each word clipped but calm. “What more do you think I need to give you?”

Tony telegraphed the move long, long seconds before he made it. Steve willed him _not to say it_ – his lungs frozen, the hallway blurring, and Tony’s face becoming ugly, as if Steve was seeing him for the first time.

“How about some fucking clarity. You let a murderer go. _Murderer,_ Rogers. If he was anyone else, and not your fucking boyfriend from ’43, you wouldn’t’ve thought twice.”

Steve stepped back, heart pounding, done with this. 

For a moment, he worried that this choice would give Tony an excuse to go after Bucky.  No matter what Tony said or thought, SHIELD couldn’t find Bucky any more than Steve could – and, if they tried, he could still rely on Natasha and Sharon to tell him.   

“What’s that phrase these days?” Steve asked. “Oh. Right back at you. Did I get that right?”

He turned around and stalked toward the door, the busy City street outside within sight. Hand palm flat against the door, Steve was a step past the threshold when Tony finally scraped up his best and only retort.

“No, actually, you got it completely fucking wrong. Enjoy art school. Bob.”

“You bet.”

***

In early September, Steve didn’t see much of anyone. Sharon was busy with SHIELD. Sam was busy with his counseling classes.

Steve set one foot on the art school’s campus. Surrounded by twenty-somethings who didn’t spend time looking past Steve’s sunglasses and ballcap, or his fake name of Tyler Smith, he was immediately happy that his program was mostly online.

At night, he went to his building’s rooftop and sketched through dozens of pages in the humid moonlight. When the sky was clear and the stars shone brightly, he traced Orion with his eyes and sent thoughts to a person: _There’s Orion. I hope you see it._

Near October, Sharon came almost every weekend. With her, she brought the distinct smell of the City – and of the commuter train.

She also brought laughter: the kind that made Steve’s stomach hurt. She brought smiles: the kind that made Steve’s eyes crinkle. She brought coffee he didn’t like, movies he watched three times over in the days between her visits, tickets to events he never would have sought on his own, and ideas to restaurants he never would have found.

In the days between, Sam texted him things like, _“Have u asked her out?” “dude what r u waiting for” “man I dont even know with u sometimes”_ and _“oh shit u’ve never dated.”_ With friends like that…

 _“Sam - Thanks, -Steve,”_ Steve answered.

(Sam replied, _“Dearest Cap, dude no come c me for texting lessons_.")

In late October, as the leaves turned to yellows and oranges, as the air turned crisp, and when the wind turned bitter, Steve asked her, “Are you for real?”

In the middle of Meridian Hill Park, right in front of the grand central cascade of water, people shuffling past them, Sharon stopped and looked him squarely. “I’m imaginary. You’re still in the Arctic.”

She wanted him to roll his eyes, and he obliged. “You know what I mean.”

She stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets. “This is real. I’m not spying on you. I’m not handling you. They want me to. I won’t.”

Steve studied her face—earnest, empathetic, and annoyed enough to show it. He believed her.

“All right,” he acquiesced. “What are we then?”

It’d been five months, and he didn’t know, even with Sam’s terrible efforts at advice.

Sharon cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. “Slow?”

Steve took the hint and solved the problem with a very public-facing display of affection. That old voice said a very modern sounding thing:  _Get it._

_Shut up._

In November, Sam and Sharon came for Thanksgiving. No one else - not Tony, not Natasha, not any of the rest of them. His apartment wasn’t that big, he told himself. As it was, his neighbors complained plenty about Sam and Sharon's effusive screaming at the televised football game.

In December, Sharon handed him a rectangular box wrapped in bright red and gold-dotted shiny paper. Butterflies flapping in his gut, Steve reciprocated with a small cube wrapped in plain green paper.

Sharon’s impatient excitement flipped to fear. He knew what it looked like. It wasn’t what she thought.

“Same time?” Steve offered to Sharon’s accepting nod.

He unwrapped his box by breaking the tape on each end and carefully flicking up each flap of paper. He poked out a heavy white box and found the newest Apple drawing tablet – the one all over TV with trendy commercials.

“You better use it,” Sharon warned, voice tinged with the sarcastic humor that he might have loved. “Talk about a pretty penny.”

Steve didn’t reply – but he had a reply locked and loaded, only waiting for her to open her little box.

She did. Instead of the ring she feared, it was a plain silver key cut in a hardware store, atop a pre-paid commuter pass for the DC to NYC train. Her eyes flicked from it to him.

“You better use it.” Steve didn’t allow himself a smile – not yet. “Talk about a pretty penny.”

“You want me to move in,” Sharon said, that tone he loved schooled into perfect, spy-like neutrality. “Live here.”

In the back of his head, a Sam-like voice laughed, _Too fast, man; way too fast_.

“No,” Steve responded, “I want you to use it. When you want.”

She nodded, committing to nothing.

The Internet said that the first possessions that tended to migrate over were toothbrushes, hairbrushes, and clothes. Steve found out the Internet was wrong, when he trudged into the kitchen one early January morning and noticed a bright green, budding houseplant on the windowsill. Maybe a hyacinth.

“Okay,” he said to himself and only then gave himself that smile. "Don't kill it."

Later in January, still near the start of another brand new year, he had dinner alone with Natasha. At a not-so-fancy restaurant tucked along a red-brick street somewhere in DC, she asked him, “How are you? Really?”

Steve was fine. Better than he’d been in a long while. “Decent. How’s the team?”

“Decent.” Natasha took a bite of cream-slathered pasta. “You’re not going to ask?”

Steve speared a raw onion, paired it with a roasted grape tomato, and swallowed her bait. “Any news about him?”

Nerves rattled his gut. Maybe they’d found his body somewhere. Maybe they’d discovered that HYDRA had him again. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

With a shake of her head, Natasha did nothing to dispel the myths Steve had convinced himself of. “Entirely off grid. Still.”

So. Alive and hiding – unlikely. Dead and gone – more likely. Captured by HYDRA – most likely. Meanwhile, Steve was in art school, fifteen credits under his belt and about to start the Spring 2016 semester. How fucking stupid.

“Steve.” Natasha worked to catch his eyes. “You’ve gotta let him go.”

 _Let him go_ , Steve repeated in his head.

“Everything I know, Bucky taught me,” Steve said, hoping to convey to her a single ounce of how _impossible_ it was to _let him go._ “Everything. Do you know what I’d be without’em?"

Natasha tilted her head and shook it, almost contrite but at least willing to listen.

“I wouldn’t be a lot. Let’s put it that way.”

Steve took a bite of food to keep himself from talking. She didn’t need to know more.

“Give yourself credit. He wasn’t whispering in your ear, when you took out Krausberg.”

Steve laughed, closed his eyes, and shook his head. Now he was hearing things. “You sound like him sometimes.”

Natasha sipped water, something bubbling under her surface but never, not ever, revealing itself. “How’s Sharon?”

Steve felt himself light up, and, most importantly, he let himself do it. “Sharon’s great.”

February came with a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a pile of women’s clothes, and another houseplant. He’d killed the first one and said it’d fallen out of the window.

In class, he turned in a black and white sketch of a desolate, snow-tipped train track winding through the depths of the Alps. On paper, it’d been seventy-one years since he’d seen it in real life; in his mind, five years, and he could see it, smell it, feel it as if he’d been there yesterday.

March was a bad month. Sharon went off on an assignment: confidential, eyes-only, very dangerous. He didn’t hear from her the entire time. Classes were dull and boring. TV was inane; the news, even worse. He used his drawing tablet to draw, paint, sketch, imagine. He only put one sketch to real paper and hoped a fool’s hope that a certain person would one day see it.

Early April came and went. The TV stayed off from the first through the seventh, the usual period of time when the news still went batshit (a great new word he’d learned) about Insight.

After, he took a walk near the Potomac, near the old Triskelion, below an empty spot in the air where he’d once fought his best friend over the fate of millions – and couldn’t help but scan the crowds, every face, every shadow in the hope of finding that friend.

_Buck._

At the muddy bank of the Potomac, Steve peered into the murky water. In his gut, he knew: that friend would never be found. Steve hoped he was dead and not worse.

Steve went home and found Sharon sleeping on his couch. Her face drawn with exhausted lines, her hair pulled into an unintentionally messy bun, and her legs wrapped around a wool blanket, she was back from her mission. He didn’t miss the bruise on her cheek or cut on her forehead.

He draped another blanket around her shoulders, watered the surviving plant, and let her rest in silence. Meanwhile, he stared at the blank screen of his drawing tablet, nothing left to give. Not that day.

In May, Peggy died. The news cameras filmed. Sharon eulogized. Steve, among others, carried her casket. Tony watched them from a distance; when their eyes met, Tony only shook his head and turned his back. Natasha squeezed Steve’s arm and said words that he didn’t hear.  Peggy was dead, and that was all that mattered.

In June and July, Sharon slept too much. Ate too little. Stared and daydreamed instead of talking and listening. Circles colored the skin under her eyes dark reds and grays, like a bad morning at sea. Forgot his birthday, even - who cared.

“Work’s busy,” she explained, head lolling on his shoulder. “A lot’s going on.”

“Take a break,” he suggested, because, yeah, that would honor Peggy’s memory: burning it all to the ground and walking away. Perfect. “Even a week.”

She shook her head until it nearly teetered off his shoulder. “No. It’s not that bad.” She lifted a hand and pointed at the French doors toward the balcony. “We should get window planters for there. It’s not too late.”

Eyebrow raised, Steve took out his smartphone, scrolled through Amazon, and bought a set. “Done. But if I kill’em, you can’t yell at me.”

She smiled and scoffed, “When have I ever yelled at you?”

“Have to start sometime.”

She laughed, and he believed her: she was okay.

On August 3, it’d been a full day: up at 0400, out the door by 0500, and tearing down VA-467 with the dormant sun behind them, to reach Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve by 0600. Together, Steve and Sharon had hiked all twenty miles of trails, stopping only to eat and admire the random river-side otter or rare bird sighting.

Banshee Reeks wasn’t particularly difficult terrain, but she’d kept up with him, every step of the way. Not something he’d expected. By then, he should’ve known better.

At 2025, dusk settled over DC. Crispy, dry sweat pebbled over their skin, they clamored into their apartment, dropped two backpacks at the door, and toed off their hiking shoes.

“Air conditioning!” Sharon smiled.

Steve smiled back at her, but it wasn’t because of the air conditioning.  

She caught him staring. “What?”

Her smile changed, from one of relief to one that was flat-out indecent. With both hands, she shoved him back-flat against the front door, raised up on her toes, and brushed her lips against his.

The tingle drove him crazy, and she knew it.  She knew it so well, that she caught his chin in her hand, smiled that smile again, and pressed her lips against his.  She tasted like sweat and salt, smelled like fresh lake water and sun-bleached air.

Steve slid his hand up her shirt, trailing his fingertips over the skin of her stomach, up her ribcage, and then under her bra.  She knew his sweet spot, and he sure as hell knew hers. When he got to it, her whole body jumped.

She bit his lower lip, that smile still on her face.

He pulled his lips away from hers and asked, “So, that’s how you want to do it, huh?”

“That’s how we’re doing it.”

So be it.

Steve picked her up, her legs wrapping around his torso, and carried her to the bedroom. She nipped and bit at his neck the whole god damn way there. On the bed, he put her down flat and stretched himself over her, pinning her wrists above her head with one hand and going under her shirt again with the other.

Before he knew what happened, he was flat on his back, and Sharon was straddling his hips. “Nice move.”

That smile was gone, her face blank. She leaned over him, reaching toward something he didn’t care about, and he took the opportunity to push her shirt up and lightly bite her abdomen. It usually drove her nuts, but not this time.

A drawer _clicked_ shut.

She straightened.

He saw something long and thin in her right hand.

“What’s—”

She stuck it into his neck, a pinprick jab that stung. He didn’t even have time to pull away, or see what it was, or even ask her what she was doing.

His mouth got as far as saying “Sha—” when his world bled into a rush of noise and blackness.

_Sharon._

First, he smelled dank, chalky mildew. Second, he felt the cold, hard ground. Third, he saw the darkness: pitch black, stretched forever.

He wasn’t restrained. He wasn’t in pain, except for a dull ache in his head. He still had his clothes – but no shoes.

Steve dragged his arms toward his body, palms flat against the gritty ground, and pushed himself to his knees. Even in the dark, the room tilted, his head doing loops, and he swallowed away a burst of nausea.

 _Drugged. You’ve been drugged_.

Woozy, he forced himself to his feet, and then forced himself to take one step, then two, then three, until his hand found the first wall. It felt cold, chalky, and coarse. He kept his hand on that wall and walked, dragging his hand across. He found the corner, turned, and kept walking, hand trailing against the wall. He counted every step.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

_Five._

_Six_.

Wall.

Six steps to the north wall. (He didn’t know if it was north, but it sure as hell was “north” now.)

He turned left and walked the west wall, counting steps the same way.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

Metal door. Flat. Smooth. Seamless with the wall. No window, no handle, no hinges.  He reached to its top and then all the way down to its bottom and felt nothing—absolutely nothing—that he could exploit. He kept it in mind and kept walking.

_Four._

_Five._

_Six._

Wall. He turned south and found that it was six steps to the west wall and the six steps back to the north wall.

His stride was three feet long.

The cell was 18’ by 18’. Big. He’d rather it be small.

He went back to the door, laid down flat on his stomach, and tried to look under it.

Nothing. No light, no air, no nothing. It was like it was airtight.

 _Bad thought_.

He felt along the door’s side edges, finding nothing to slip his fingers into.

He stepped away from the door, took three steadying breaths, and then kicked it as hard as he could. He fell hard on his back, pain reverberating up his ankle and into his knee.

He stood back up and ran his hand over the metal – he hadn’t even dented it.

 _Bad. This is bad_.

Steve decided to sit by the door: back against the wall, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around his knees.

He stared into the darkness and began to count.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

_Five._

_Six._

_Seven._

And on and on. Counting the seconds, until the seconds turned to minutes, and the minutes turned to an hour.

_One._

He started over.

_Two._

And again.

 _Three_.

He was almost to _four_ , when the metal door lurched: a high-pitched, reverberating sound of tearing metal.

Steve scrambled to his feet and kept his back to the wall. One chance.

The door opened away from him, light suddenly shining through, and Steve waited one, two, three, four seconds, before –

A black-clad person walked through, and Steve attacked with a punch. The person blocked it, grabbed Steve’s arm and twisted it behind Steve’s back.

“Stop!”

The word “stop” did nothing to stop him. Steve kicked the side of the person’s knee, yanked his arm out of the person’s grip, and tried to backhand the person across the face. The person deflected the attack, and Steve –

“Steve!”

Steve stopped.

Blinked.

Gave his eyes precious time to adjust and his brain time to catch up.

“ _Bucky_?”

Bucky came into focus: short, brown hair, black tactical pants, a black t-shirt, a shiny metal arm, and armed for a war. He looked tired but like himself, and that’s all that mattered.

“You okay?” Bucky asked, voice flat.

“Yeah,” Steve answered, shock coloring his voice. Of all the people he’d expected to find him here – and that number, by the way, was actually “zero” – Bucky was dead last.

“I followed HYDRA here. Why do they want you?”

Steve shook his head. Right now, he didn’t care about why HYDRA wanted him. He cared about one thing and one thing only: the person standing in front of him.

“You’re alive,” Steve said, a little dumbly. The truth of the words wrapped around him, and, even though he was a prisoner inside a HYDRA base, the weight of the world lifted, replaced by stunning relief.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Bucky asked, then quickly moved on. “We need to get going. They don’t know I’m here. Not yet.”

Bucky drew a nine-millimeter handgun from his left thigh holster and handed it to Steve, butt first. Steve took it, cradling the weight in the palm of his hand.

Bucky turned and headed out the door, when Steve caught his right arm. Before, in Kraków, he’d done the same thing and gotten a knife in his face for his trouble. This time, Bucky turned, eyebrows hiked and asked, “What?”

Steve pulled him into a hug, arms tight around Bucky’s back. He smelled like military-grade shampoo, sand, and gunpowder. Bucky’s arms came up, loose and unsure around Steve, but Steve would take anything at all.

“I missed you, Buck,” Steve breathed, and he couldn’t care less that they were standing inside a HYDRA base, and he couldn’t care less that he was putting the brakes on his own rescue.

Bucky was the world.

“Yeah. We’ve gotta get going, Steve. Now.”

Steve pulled away, looked at his friend, and nodded.

Together, they left the cell and stepped into a round, concrete hallway lit by reams of rectangular, bright fluorescent lights.

Weapon aimed, expression deadly focused, Bucky lead them down the long corridor, past multiple closed, metal doors. The corridor was empty: not a sound, not a person, not anything except those doors.

“Did you see them bring Sharon?” Steve asked.

Bucky didn’t stop moving. “Who?”

_Right._

“Blonde, tall. She was with me, when—”

The memory was fuzzy. He wasn’t sure what had happened, only that they were about to have fun times, and then the room went black.

Bucky shook his head. “I only saw them bring you.”

Steve didn’t know if he should be relieved or worried. Maybe they’d left her alone.

_Please. Let her be okay._

Bucky lead them to a stairwell, the treads gray concrete, and started to head down them. Not up.

“Buck – why’re we going down?”

Bucky didn’t even look back at him. He kept moving down the steps, and Steve chose to follow.

“There’s an emergency tunnel. They don’t watch it. If we go out the front door, we’ll have to fight every step of the way.”

Steve nodded to himself. Made sense.

He followed Bucky down four flights of stairs, the air chilling into a dull, seeping cold. Bucky pushed open a door marked “14” and immediately shot three people dead: three bullets, straight through their foreheads.

Steve didn’t give the bodies a second look.

He looked at the back of his friend, a litany of emotions rumbling through him: relief, fear, pride, disgust, gratitude, excitement.

Bucky was back.

He was _back_.

He was _here_.

“This is it,” Bucky said, as he opened a heavy steel door.

Bucky blended into a dark, dark room. Steve followed him inside and never expected the metal fist that sunk into his face, or the prick against his neck that toppled him to his hands and knees.

He couldn’t see.

He felt hands wrap around his wrists, the gun tear out of his boneless fingers, and his body drag along the floor, then raise up. Cold restraints locked around his wrists.

The hands went away, and he couldn’t support his own weight; his body rested entirely, agonizingly on his wrists.

Somebody cut away his shirt, the stale air prickly cold against his bare skin.

Something thick and wet slathered onto his chest and stomach; he tried to follow the pattern – circular, with curly tendrils. It almost felt like glue.

He heard a lighter _flick_ to life and smelled fresh cigarette smoke.

“Welcome to your new home, Steve. I hope you like it.”

Footsteps _pattered_ along the concrete, and the door _slammed_ closed.

The overhead lights _sizzled_ to life, and, already, Steve’s eyes were unaccustomed to brightness. He blinked and squinted, vision blurry and bouncing.

 _Drugs. It’s the drugs_.

Even through the haze, he saw Bucky smile, a lit cigarette between his lips. Like always. Like before.

“Buck,” Steve said, slurred. “What’re you doin’?”

Bucky took that cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, blew out smoke, and then looked to Steve. “White phosphorus. Have you heard of it?”

It couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be.

Bucky used that cigarette to light the glue on Steve’s chest, and Steve – 

***

The story will continue in _Chapter 2: Ride and Die._


	2. Ride and Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These handful of hours have made it crystal clear: Barnes should have spent the past few months tearing HYDRA apart again, not terrorizing fish and reading shitty books.

Barnes leaned his fishing pole against the wall of the cabin. The butt of his cigarette joined a soggy pile of others on the ground. The last word on his smoking habit was that it was going to kill him; he didn't much believe that, not when nothing else in this world had.

He led Steve around to the front door, but, before going up the steps, he had words – the ones he should've said years ago. He stopped walking, turned just a bit, and looked straight at Steve.

"I should have said this a long time ago. I  _wish_  I'd said this a long time ago. I'm sorry, for everything I did—on the rooftop, on the highway, on the helicarrier. In Kraków. And thank you, for bringing me back. Because you did."

Steve flinched, and then hugged himself. He didn't respond at all to what Barnes had said. Not exactly the dreamed-about homecoming. It might not ever be.

It wasn't that he  _expected_  something. Natasha's text—a warning sent a few minutes ago—had been clear: even after something like half a year, Steve still wasn't well. Her ridiculous advice was to "proceed with extreme discretion."

Whatever that meant.

He pulled a silver key out of his pocket, climbed the steps, and opened the front door. He went in first and held the door open for Steve, half-expecting Steve to take off.

Steve came inside.

Barnes closed the door, leaned against the kitchen counter while Steve wandered, and looked at his own place from someone else's perspective: decent furniture, newer appliances, clean, and very small.

Except the books, everything in it had come with the place. He'd done nothing to it, not in the nearly two years he'd owned it – all cash, totally under the table, because the little old lady who'd wanted to get rid of it despised the government, and, sometimes, just sometimes, the stars aligned and  _shit worked out._

"How long have you lived here?" Steve asked.

"Almost two years. Kinda love it."

Almost immediately, he knew he'd been too honest. Both Natasha  _and_  Sam had told him: when he'd gone off-grid, Steve had assumed the worst two options – dead or captured. Not living in the backcountry of upstate New York.

Steve nodded, body tight and tense and still. It didn't matter how big or small he was, Steve hadn't changed, and Barnes recognized that reaction.

He tried to explain  _why here_. "The town's small, out of the way from all the touristy shit. I know the people. Weird enough strangers come through, and people start talking."

Didn't help.

"Oh, yeah?" Steve hedged, distant.

"Yeah," Barnes shrugged, frowning. Extreme discretion – he still didn't know what that was supposed to look like, but he was done lying to protect Steve. Every path forward, whatever those paths looked like, were going to be god damned  _clean_. "You got lost three times and finally asked Susie Marie for directions."

He'd gotten that text, too: super weird, small town intelligence.

Steve's faced screwed up, eyebrows lifting. It was his "I don't give a fuck" face.

 _Great_.

"You're happy here?"

The problem with that "clean path" was that it was ugly. Rough. Treacherous, even.

Barnes watched Steve pick up a paperback and flip the pages.

They'd either make it through, or die on it. Simple enough.

"I'm done being a weapon. This is the only place I've found that doesn't flip that particular switch every five minutes."

Every word was more or less the truth.

After finding Nick Fury's millions of dollars and life-changing letter in Zurich— _what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck,_ he remembered thinking—he'd wandered for a month or two. "I quit" was easy; finding some sort of purpose, not so much.

"You can work on fixing that, you know."

By any measure, Barnes wasn't a saint. Hadn't perfected this "I get it" thing yet. Often, lashed out.

Words were coming out of his mouth, before he realized Steve had flicked a sore point. "I had 512 confirmed kills as  _your_  overwatch." On average, thirty-four a month, more than one a day. Fucking  _insane_. "HYDRA didn't really have to work for it, you know?"

Barnes looked down, suddenly raw enough that he didn't want to look at Steve. Another sore point: even back then,  _especially_  back then, they'd been tearing each other apart at the seams. There was only so much blood Steve could wipe onto his sleeves – and only so much they could survive, even before they'd died.

"What's  _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_ about?"

_What the fuck._

Barnes sighed, almost laughed, and answered, "I don't know; I haven't read it yet. What do you want from this, Steve?"

"I don't know," Steve whispered. Barnes watched him bury his face into his open palms. "I don't know."

He sounded so, so broken; so, so confused; so, so lost. Shoes toed off, bare feet still river-water soggy, Barnes walked the short way to the living room and dropped into the chair across from the sofa.

"How're you doin'?" Barnes asked. It could be early 1943, the last time they were the same people they were always supposed to be. "After... After Death Valley?"

"I'm doin'," Steve answered, palms still hiding his face. "It was only three months."

It didn't matter  _how long_ , only that it had  _happened_. HYDRA didn't let people like them go easily. The  _only_  reason Steve wasn't still there was because HYDRA'd gotten stupidly ambitious, and  _they'd_  gotten lucky.

"They  _had_ you. It's not easy to let that go."

Steve's palms dug in harder. "They still do. There's just a gap. I'm working on making it longer."

Said like a person who didn't think he was working hard enough. Who thought he wasn't doing good enough.

"You're doing great, Steve. Real great."

"No. No, it's already started, and I can't... I just needed to see you. I just... Are we good?"

So, that was the point of this: to be good. As if any of this would ever be good.

In the distance, Lockheed-Martin engines cut through the sky. A Quinjet. Then the distinct sound of a motorcycle's revving engine. All sooner than he'd expected.

"We're good," Barnes answered, not a care in the whole fucking world that his voice shook, or that his eyes stung. "No matter what, we're good."

Steve nodded, palms still pressed into his face. "One day, okay? One day."

He was going to lose it. He was going to  _fucking lose it_  and that wouldn't be fair to Steve. He forced himself to hold it together and say, "One day."

Not nearly god damn enough.

Steve's palms dropped, at the same time he rapidly stood up and turned away, gaze on the floor. His hands were tight fists.

Steve couldn't look at him. He couldn't  _look at him_. But he could look at the fucking knife block.

"Steve?"

No response. Only the stare locked on the knives.

Right. Like the broken beer bottle back at the river.

"They're ceramic," Barnes said. "They'll just break."

Maybe.

The front door open, the roar of Natasha's motorcycle closer, Steve said, "I gotta go, Buck."

Barnes answered, "Goodbye, Steve," but it wasn't nearly god damn enough.

Four days of seething later, he demanded to know, "What the fuck was that?!"

Barnes stared at Natasha and Hill, eyes wide, more unhinged than he would've liked. Too late now.

"Barnes—" they said, simultaneously. Hill looked worried, tense; Natasha, discouraged.

He took a breath. Calmed down. Sort of. " _That's_  where he is, after seven months?  _I_ was better than that after seven months."

Hill's gaze went to the floor, arms tightening around her chest. And he knew. He god damned  _knew_ , and he barely even  _knew her_.

"The therapist?" He drew forward, eyes wide again, because he'd  _asked her._

Hill raised her index finger, eyes off the floor and transformed into a harsh, hard glare. "You left. You had a chance to stay, to help. You left. Don't come here like this."

Her hand dropped; the glare didn't.

Natasha didn't offer a word of support, for either of them.

Barnes held Hill's gaze and, without dropping it, asked, "Nat, can you leave?"

Hill's eyes narrowed.

He hoped he wasn't showing his cards: how he was floating above the room, how he'd formulated this plan in the space of a second, how unsure he was of what he was about to do.

Natasha kicked off the wall, brushed past him, and, out of the corner of his eye, saw her look at them until she was clear through the door.

"Am I still SHIELD?"

Hill blinked once. "Barely."

That was the best kind of "yes."

"Let me take Steve, while you figure out why SHIELD's still HYDRA."

Hill's expression got really fucking blank, and her eyes pierced into his for moments that slowly grated into longer moments. When she finally looked away, her jaw worked, wheels turning. "You get a month. Take Wilson. There's a safe house in Brazil."

"What, so HYDRA can have a map? You trust me or you don't, at this point."

Expression still revealing nothing, Hill answered, "It's safe. Brazil. One month. You're SHIELD or you're not, at this point. Get off the fence."

It felt like a defining moment in time, and he came down from it while lying on Natasha's bed, his head in her lap. He had a great view of the ceiling, while her fingernails danced over his forehead and through his hair.

She always knew how to bring him back down.

"You didn't tell me." She didn't sound mad.

"I didn't plan to do it."

A too-long silence.

"Steve is dangerous. Your plan is terrible."

He could've laughed. First: what plan? Second: "Is that what you told him about me, way back when?"

"Yes." Natasha didn't mince her words. He might have loved her for it. "He doesn't have your control. He doesn't compartmentalize well. He's never rebounded. He's raw, and you touch the nerves."

Steve didn't cope with shit: not news. He never had. He dug deep and shut down. Steve Rogers was never  _well-adjusted_ , or so they called it.

None of that mattered. "You have no one else to do this. Unless you're gonna call that Thor guy?"

He felt her head shake. "Be careful."

Sam didn't take it as well. "Seven months. And now you're here? And you want to skip the country?"

"Yeah."

Sam threw his head back and laughed a high-strung, end-of-the-road laugh. He sounded and looked  _done_. "You are… out of your fucking mind."

"Sam," Barnes said, planning on beginning a very articulate, well-reasoned argument.

"No. You know what Hotwheels are?"

Barnes furrowed his eyebrows and determined that, no, he did not know what Hotwheels were. He shook his head.

"Little toy cars that you put on little toy tracks. They do loops. When I was a kid, I had this little, gray track, and my cars did little loops on that track, all day long. Sometimes, the car would fly off the track and crash into the carpet. But it was okay – I just picked it up, put it back on the track, and watched it do its loop."

Barnes stared, lost.

"Steve is the car. His entire world is that little, gray track. You got him on a good day. On  _a bad day_ , all he can talk about is that you're dead, HYDRA's got Sharon, and we're all liars. On a  _really bad day_ , we can't stop him. I don't think you can."

Sam said it all, like he expected Barnes to come to some sudden realization that, oh, god, no, this wasn't doable.

"Okay," Barnes shrugged. "On my bad days, back in 2014, I killed people."

"HYDRA," Sam responded, flat.

"Shitty people," Barnes compromised. "You call it a loop. I call it circles. Stepping away from that world was the only thing that stopped them for me." He paused, not for dramatic effect, but because this might get ugly. "Does he have that choice?"

Bitter anger flashed across Sam's face. " _You_ left.  _You_ decided that  _you_  couldn't do this.  _You_  decided that  _we_ could. Where was all this grand, bullshit wisdom seven months ago?"

Barnes nodded and nodded, agreeing with it all. He didn't—couldn't—rebuke Sam's anger.

"I'm here now—"

" _For now_ ," Sam interrupted.

"I think it's the right path. I would appreciate you being there. Also: Hill's insisting."

The server set down a thin-crust pepperoni pizza, slices cut huge – the kind that needed folded in half, the only kind.

Sam grabbed the first slice and warned, "Don't you fucking eat it all."

Barnes grabbed and stacked two. "Learn to eat faster."

"If you're gonna be like that, the answer's  _no_."

Which meant: the answer was  _yes_. All he had to do was get Steve and  _go_.

***

On the bleached gray tarmac, Stark's private hangar sitting closed behind them, Sam slips off his cotton jacket and ties it around his waist. At 0228, it's already sticky humid, oppressively hot, and drizzling warm rain. Brazil calls this "winter."

"You said anywhere I wanted," Steve bites, a harsh glare aimed at Barnes.

To his credit, Barnes ignores the tone. He pulls on a black ball cap—backwards, and that's new for Barnes, Sam notices—and regards Steve calmly. "For now, here."

"What, you don't like 80-degree humidity at three in the morning?" Sam hopes to cut the tension. "This is gonna be great."

"Something like that."

The drive over to Sao Paulo is going to be fantastic; Sam can feel it. Nine  _more_  hours of awkward tension.

At the car – one of Tony's, a discreet dark blue sedan – Barnes says to Sam, "I flew; you drive." Then, to Steve, "You want the front passenger seat?"

"Shotgun, man," Sam says. "That's called 'shotgun.' And you're doing it wrong."

Barnes ignores Sam, not that Sam blames him.

Steve's pissed-off expression hasn't changed since landing. His left eye twitches, though; a tiny tell that had preceded several violent outbursts in the last seven months.

Sam's got a pocket full of Natasha's taser discs, and Sam can think of nothing worse—or maybe nothing better, he doesn't even know—than turning right back around and going home.

"Not really. I don't trust you behind me," Steve says.

"'Kay." Barnes seems nonchalant but that's a word that historically means he's upset. "Get in the back."

Sam thinks that's it: good to go. He makes toward the driver's side, keys in his hand, when he hears it:  _SMACK, CRUNCH_. The car lurches into him, moving two, three feet in a second, so hard that it knocks him down.

"Hey—"

"Don't fucking  _do_  that. Pretend it doesn't bother you. I know it does."

Sam jumps to his feet, spins around, heart racing, and sees Barnes pinned against the passenger side of the car, both of Steve's hands clenched around Barnes' t-shirt.

"Steve.  _Steve_. Steve!" Sam shouts, running back toward them without one damned clue about what he's supposed to do.

"Right there, where you're pushing – it still hurts."

Steve's eyes drop to where his hands are, and, in that moment, all three of them might share a memory. Sam would love to close his eyes right now, scrub that awful image away, but – he doesn't trust Steve. And he doesn't trust Barnes to protect himself.

"Steve, step off!" Sam barks.

Steve doesn't. But he blinks, and his expression softens, and Sam barely hears, "It's so scrambled, Buck. This isn't…"

"Isn't you. I know. Trust me, I know."

Steve's hands fall. Metal  _crinkles_ and  _pops_ , leaving a Barnes-shaped dent in the rear quarter of the car.

Ten hours in, and the Ride-or-Die couple has already transcended to Ride-and-Die. Just  _perfect_.

"Get in the car, Steve," Barnes says, gentle in a way Sam's never heard.

Without another word, Steve does—slips into the back seat, still not the front—and Sam watches Barnes close his eyes, tilt his face toward the cloud-wisped sky, and breathe deeply.

Sam wipes rain and droplets of sweat from his forehead, biting his tongue harder and harder: so much on his mind and not one damn decent way to say it.  _This is a mistake_  fights to be heard.

Barnes pulls a cigarette and lighter from somewhere. The lighter flicks to life, yellow-orange licks of fire stark against the darkness. A cloudy musk of cheap, filtered tobacco folds into the muggy air. Sam loves the smell; always has.

He doesn't quite love what Barnes says next. "Hotel's twenty-five miles southeast. I'll meet you down there."

Sam laughs, already done with this insane plan to "help" Steve. "Dude, it's been ten hours. You really wanna go a month like this?"

"I'll be there in an hour or two. Text me the room. Don't get a shitty one."

If Sam's learned anything, it's that once Barnes is attached to a stupid idea, he doesn't let go of it. Barnes and Steve are too alike that way.

"Yeah" is all Sam can bring himself to say, and he leaves Barnes behind, the car's smooth motor revving before he's fully realized his decision. He glances in the rearview, Barnes already gone.

"Where's Bucky?"

Sam shifts the car's transmission into drive. "He'll meet us there."

Steve scoots down, clothes rustling against the leather seat, and doesn't respond.

Sam drives.

***

Barnes takes his time, reaching the hotel in a bit over two hours. When he crosses the edge of the parking lot, he's coated in thick droplets of sweat: his shirt is stuck to his back, and his jeans are damp against his thighs. He fucking hates humidity.

The four-story hotel looks like a dump but is one of the best things he's seen in a long, long time. He hasn't slept since Steve found the cabin – and, even for him, that's pushing it hard.

Barnes walks into the hotel's front entrance, strides passed the unattended front desk, finds the stairwell, heads up to the third floor, and knocks on the cracked, brown door to Room 320.

He hears a  _thump_ , then footsteps, and then the  _squeak_  of a latch releasing.

Sam opens the door. "Every room was shitty."

Barnes nods and shoulders his way into the room. It smells old and musty. Translucent dust particles float in the air. The subfloor under the yellow-orange carpet squishes under his feet.

Beyond that, it looks small. The bathroom is to the left of the room's entryway; ahead of him, a tiny living room and an even tinier hallway, which must lead to two rooms.

"Steve's on the left. I've got the couch."

Barnes doesn't argue and, by the time he's stripping off his sweat-damp clothes inside the right-hand bedroom, he can't remember if he even responded to Sam.

_Fuck. Whatever._

He picks through his backpack and gets re-dressed,  _just in case_  an instinct not so easy to shrug away. He strips the bed of its coarse, stale bedding down to the stained, white flat sheet. It all reminds him of the shitty Super 8 between Omaha and Des Moines, the one he'd stayed at a lifetime ago in 2015.

On another instinct, another one he can't so easily put to rest, he grabs his newer SIG Sauer and slides it under one of the flat, yellowed pillows. He leaves a CZ-75 in the middle of his bag, tucked between folds of clothes.

Sleep comes easy. He dreams of his childhood home existing inside the windowless, brick walls of the Arctic cosmodrome. He dreams of his folks, of his siblings, of Anna, of other people—people he hates, who took everything—existing in the same space, the same world, and he wakes with the insides of his chest twisting.

The dream fades, its details dimming, and he simply rolls over and goes back to sleep, no point in chasing irretrievable vapors.

The rattling of a handgun wakes him from that feather-light sleep. He rolls over from his right side onto his back and blinks upward.

His own gun—the CZ-75—is aimed at his face.

In the living room, Sam snores loudly: no help there. Not that he needs it. Rather, he simply reaches up with his right hand and twists the gun out of Steve's grip.

Steve only whispers feather-light apologies: "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I can't control it."

Barnes slips the gun under his pillow, next to the other one, and simply says, "Go to sleep, Steve."

"No. I'm going to hurt you. I'm  _sick_ , Buck, and I'm—"

"You're not sick," Barnes says, intentionally keeping his tone of voice even and factual. "SHIELD is still compromised. Someone there was making you sick.  _I'm sorry_ – that I left you there for so long. Okay. Sleep, okay?"

Barnes closes his eyes and rolls over, his back to Steve, but Steve doesn't move. He just takes a ton of little breaths and blows them back out; it sounds like he's wanting to say something, but keeps deciding not to.

"Steve?"

"Do..."

Everyone always expected small, skinny, sickly Steve Rogers, with his dead dad and working mother and no siblings and not a lot of friends, to be timid and shy. No one ever expected his strong voice, or his resolute strength, or his stubborn resolve.

Steve Rogers was never timid or shy, and he never stumbled over his words. He was a fucking incorrigible spitfire.

And, yet.

"Do you... Do you wanna go up to the roof? Like when, you know, like when we were kids?"

Barnes doesn't hesitate, even though he really wants to—needs to—sleep. "Yeah, sure. It'll be fun."

The stars are clearer than they've been since they landed in Brazil. To Barnes, they look exactly the same everywhere in the world: glowing dots and specks of white. If he thinks too long about what it all means—that, really, he's the speck—he ends up going down a bad, bad path, the one Natasha and Sam are always so worried about.

"That one's Scorpius."

Barnes follows Steve's finger up to the sky, but he's not even looking.

"Look, there's the stinger," Steve urges, tracing an imaginary line. "You see it?"

His chest is tight with anxiety, and phantom pains shoot through his body. It's almost like he can feel the bullets and the last couple of seconds of life leaving his body. These words—this half-assed tradition from decades ago— _hurt_ , and he wonders, just for a moment, he wonders, if Steve knows—

"Yeah. Yeah, I can see it," he lies, breathless and hoping Steve doesn't notice.

Steve goes on like that a couple more times, a couple more constellations, his enthusiasm waning with each one. Barnes closes his eyes, giving nothing more than "uh-huh" and "yeah" answers, physical and emotional exhaustion ripping at his seams.

Steve's arm  _thuds_ against the blacktop. Barnes snaps his eyes open, the dark sky a muddled blur. Somewhere, the sun's coming up, but, here, not for a little while longer.

"I killed you."

The voice is small, unbelieving. It's nothing like the Steve he remembers.

"Still here," Barnes says, casual.

Sam once mentioned that Steve read a file; Barnes imagines that file might have mentioned a handful of would-be deaths. It's maybe too much to ask for Steve to realize that dying doesn't carry nearly the same weight for him as it seems to for others. It's okay that he's here – but it'd be okay, better even, if he wasn't.

"I can't stop thinking about it. You told me not to." Steve laughs through the last part, a dragging moan cutting through the rumble of the passing highway cars.

In that Death Valley room, Steve a feral animal circling him, Barnes had meant every word. He doesn't know how to say something so small that carries such huge expectations—to a person he once could tell almost anything to.

"We didn't end there," Barnes says. "That's what I'm saying now."

Steve shifts, pulling his arms under his head. "That's a hell of a promise."

It might be one he can't keep, but if he's learned anything— _anything_ —it's that the world can bend. His mind spins around that thought, a sluggish centrifuge.

His eyes drift shut, heavier than cinderblocks, and if he pretends—if he pretends enough, hard enough, this can almost be like before the War. Crashing hard after a long day and a longer night at his jobs, Steve a quiet, immutable presence, with a screeching-music mystery on the crackling radio, the kind that Steve always ruined by figuring it out so quick.

Forget the War. Forget Krausberg. Forget HYDRA. Forget the Winter Soldier. Forget the worst part of a century.

It's a warm, hollow cluster of thoughts that drag him back to sleep, the air sticking to his skin and sitting heavy in his lungs, the sky and its passing clouds dark.

***

Sam jerks awake about ten, fifteen times between 0300ish and 0900. It's the most worthless jab at sleep he's had in months, and his body is pushing for food and, most importantly, coffee.

He sits up, head pressed to his knees, back muscles stretching, and listens. He hears the ambience of the highway out front, and the quiet din of the low-volume TV beside him.

Otherwise, he doesn't hear the tell-tale sounds of sleeping: Steve's incessant snoring, or the upset whirring of Barnes' arm. He doesn't hear the shower running or voices talking.

That worries him.

Sam puts his feet flat onto the shaggy, squishy carpet, and shifts the faintest bit of pressure onto his aching, screaming left knee. It's already going to be that kind of a day.

He walks it off the best that he can, planning on digging a bottle of anti-inflammatories out of his bag in a few minutes. Before that, he wants to find Steve and Barnes.

He checks the bathroom first: the lights are off, the curtain dry.

Sam backtracks to the living space and checks Barnes' room. He leaves the lights off, but, even in the dark, he sees clothes and bed covers on the floor. The bed itself is cold and empty.

Back in Europe, Barnes often wandered to rooftops, alleyways, and busy streets. For a sniper, he didn't like to be still. So, that's probably what's happening here.

Sam's gut tells him it's not.

When Sam turns around, his arm brushes against something unexpected. He damn near jumps out of his skin.

Heart pattering, lungs frozen, limbs on god damn fire, Sam steadies his eyes, looks through the darkness, and sees Steve: only Steve, standing still, arms at his side, quiet and staring.

Sam takes a breath, forcing his lungs to start working again. "Cap. Where's Barnes?"

Steve visibly stiffens: his shoulders drawing up, has-its-own-zip-code chest puffing out. It's a harsh reminder of the  _hugeness_  of Steve's stature—and that, often now, he's scared of Steve.

 _I miss you_ , Sam thinks at the person standing right in front of him.

"His name's Bucky." Steve is palpably upset.

"Okay," Sam acquiesces. "Where's Bucky?"

Steve steps forward, closer than close. Sam can feel his huffs of warm breath. He can see the bloodshot whites of Steve's eyes, even in the dark.

"Don't patronize me."

There's no time to lock up. All his life, people—his parents, teachers, coaches, friends—said one thing: Sam T. Wilson is lightning on his feet, cooler than a blizzard. Nobody had nothing on him. None of that prepared him for this, is the thing.

"Where'd that nickname come from?" Sam asks, changing the subject ever so slightly. "His middle name?"

Steve closes his eyes and swallows, his shoulders coming down a fraction. "No."

"His sister made it?" Sam guesses. Becca makes Rebecca makes Becky and isn't a huge leap to Bucky. Kids are good at twisting names like that.

"I tried to shoot him."

A chill winds through Sam, prickling from the back of his neck down to his feet.  _He's dead._

"Steve, where is he?"

Silence pulses between them, a quiet, still boxing match of bubbling nerves and livewire tension. Not for the first time, Sam's reminded of the hours between the helicarriers crashing into the ground and Steve's body being spotted on the river bank – of the dead calm, near-certain conclusion that Steve had been killed and his murderer was nowhere to be found.

It's so fucking backwards.

"Steve."

Steve's eyes roam around the room, aimless. "I tried to shoot him. Is he… I think he's dead."

Sam's got only one, useless thought left in his head: Natasha should have come. "Where."

Steve's eyes lock onto a point behind Sam. Sam briefly looks behind himself to see what it is – and sees a blank, beige wall.

Steve's on one of his downward loops: clarity dissolved, lucidity barely-there, with absolutely no power to think beyond HYDRA's distorted reality. This is where it usually gets violent, and here, right now, Sam feels like he's powerlessly watching a bad car accident.

His phone, taser discs, and wings are in the living room. Steve is between Sam and the door. They're four stories up, and a jump out the window guarantees at least one broken leg.

"Is Sharon…" Steve's head tilts. "HYDRA has Sharon."

"No, man, they  _don't_ " is Sam's typical response, said when Iron Man, War Machine, Black Widow, Maria Hill, and, hell, even the Hulk are all on-call with a murmur from JARVIS.

"How about a run?" Sam asks instead, hoping to get Steve out of this room.

If Sam can get to his wings and his phone, he can—

A door  _clicks_  open and then closed. The hallway dimly illuminates. Quiet footsteps start down the hall, and Sam swears he hears the familiar  _whir_  of Barnes' arm.

Sam lets go of a long-held breath.  _He's alive_.

***

Barnes rounds the corner and stops inside the doorway, wholly unsurprised to see Sam and Steve in his room.

He looks at Sam for a moment—Sam's body language screams  _scared—_ and then flatly asks Steve, "Were you going for the gun?"

For all Steve reacts to the question, Barnes doesn't exist. "Where is she?" Steve asks.

Barnes wonders who "she" is supposed to be.

These handful of hours have made it crystal clear: Barnes should have spent the past few months tearing HYDRA apart again, not terrorizing fish and reading shitty books.

Sam stands motionless, arms loose at his side, expression neutral, his entire purpose to de-escalate Steve. "I don't know. But I  _do_ know that she's not—"

In a single, endless fraction of a second, Steve's body tenses, he takes a long step toward Sam, and his hands move threateningly toward Sam's chest.

Barnes doesn't wait to see how Sam handles it. One punch can kill him. He lunges for Steve, grabs the back of his shoulder with his left hand, and pulls him back.

Steve has never known when to stop, let alone when to back down. He whips around, left fist swinging, eyes wide and raging. Barnes slaps the Steve's fist away with an open hand, steps backward, and lures Steve away from Sam.

Steve keeps coming: another punch, a back kick, aggressively pushing Barnes further and further backward. Barnes' body hits the hallway wall, Steve a breath away.

His face is hatred.

Steve swings, and Barnes drops to the floor to avoid the punch. Steve's fist crunches through a single layer of drywall, yellowed sheetrock dust exploding into the air.

Barnes comes up under Steve's legs, carrying all of Steve's weight on his shoulders. He springs up and forward, then sloppily throws them both to the ground. Barnes tries to roll away, but he's not fast enough: Steve kicks him in the jaw, and his neck painfully cracks.

Someone is yelling – a loud voice, a panicked tone, but the words themselves are lost to a jagged memory of Death Valley.

His chest and right shoulder throb with deep, barbed aches. The hallway pulls away; lightheaded, he feels like he floats above it, a spectator to a one-sided fist fight. Strangely, he's not afraid more than he's overwhelmed by sadness and loss.

 _Steve_. This is  _Steve_ : the one person none of this was ever supposed to touch.

Senseless, Barnes pushes Steve away with his left hand. Maybe Steve was kicking, or maybe Steve was punching, it doesn't matter. He sees Steve land on his back meters away, but he doesn't hear a  _thump_  or a shout.

Barnes stands up. He hears his own breaths echoed in his ears. He still feels those aches but knows they're not real. Wet droplets tickle his right hand, and he smells blood – now, that's real.

Steve gets up, like Steve does. Barnes watches the dramatic heaving of Steve's huge fucking chest, with boobs like Mary Miller's, and remembers that he can't really be one to judge anymore.

"Are we done?" Barnes asks, although he's not sure his brain is entirely working. His voice sounds distant.

Steve's eyes flick back and forth between Barnes and a point behind Barnes, which is probably Sam. "Yeah, we're done," Steve says with venom and permanence. He turns toward the living room.

They're nowhere near fucking  _done_.

For now, Barnes sags against the wall, even more exhausted than before, and closes his eyes. He wants a long, hard sleep, buried under thick covers, in a dark, cold –

" _Steve!_ "

The Winter Soldier would have never let it happen. He would have heard the footsteps, heard the changes in Steve's body, and fended off the attack before it  _became_  an attack. The Winter Soldier, unfortunately, is buried under years of thoughts, experiences, and distractions. He doesn't usually consider it a problem more than a victory.

Steve pins him against the wall: one arm across Barnes' throat, the other hand merciless around his right elbow. The hatred isn't any less.

"How's that arm?"

Barnes first thinks that Steve is talking about his left one, until he puts it together: Steve's grip on his right elbow is tighter and more painful. Steve's threatening to break it again, like on the helicarrier.

He can't—won't—let him do that, to either of them.

Barnes shifts his weight into Steve and wraps his left hand around Steve's. He squeezes enough for Steve's fingers to involuntarily weaken their grip. When they do, he pulls his right arm free, bats away Steve's other arm, and retreats to a safe-ish distance.

"What the hell'd they do to you?"

He should have kept his mouth shut, walked away, and de-escalated this. But  _holy fuck_  – there's something sadistic writhing under Steve's skin, something vicious that HYDRA had never managed to warp into his brain – things he would  _do_  when told but never  _enjoy_.

Barnes hears Sam move behind him. Barnes holds out his left arm, blocking Sam from moving forward.

HYDRA is good, real good, at tugging out the brutal parts of their victims. He's witnessed it dozens and dozens of times. When he thinks about it these days, he's reminded of his mom's seam ripper and how she knew to pull on precisely the right threads to unravel a garment.

Every part of Steve radiates barely-contained bitterness. "You know."

"C'mon, move," Sam whispers. "He's—"

"No."

Barnes isn't moving until Steve comes back down. He hasn't thought ahead to the possibility that, one of these times, Steve won't make it back down.

"What if they'd killed you, before anyone ever knew?" Steve asks. "Where would we all be?"

Those questions come from a place of hurt, and Barnes' response comes from an equally  _unhurt_  place. His only goal is to shock Steve back into himself. "Would've saved you the trouble, huh?"

Steve draws back, as good as being slapped in the face. The color drains from his cheeks, his brow twitches, and he's got precisely  _zero_  words to say about that.

A god damn miracle descends from heaven: Steve turns and moves away, stiffly walking out of the room and back toward the living area, for good this time.

Barnes rubs his eyes with his right hand, silent until he notices Sam's stare. "What."

"Tell me you don't believe that. That it'd be better if you'd…"

It would be better. Absolutely undeniably.

Barnes shrugs, avoiding eye contact. "Doesn't matter."

"It  _matters_."

Irritation turns his body restless, and his mind yearns to lash out—and take a chunk of meat out of Sam.

Instead, Barnes takes a breath. "Not right now."

"More on that later," Sam warns, a finger pointed.

Whatever.

"Look. It's been less than a day, and he's—" Sam apparently can't say  _unstable and hostile._ "We should go home. There's no shame."

Sam's version of "go home" is Barnes' version of "disappear." No more cabin in upstate New York; no more dumb river with the dumb fish; no more Susie Marie and weird, small-town intelligence. Steve found it, and so will HYDRA.

"HYDRA really…"

Unlike Sam, Barnes doesn't have a problem saying it, but this hotel room is small, and Steve can hear every single word. That's the only reason he doesn't finish that sentence with "fucked him up."

"Welcome to the party." Sam has the defeated, tired tone of someone who's lived this, breathed this, and dealt with this every day for seven months. "You're late."

For no reason at all, Barnes thinks of yesterday—my god, just yesterday—with Natasha.  _Is that what you told him about me?_  And her decisive response:  _Yes_.

 _Dangerous_.

Barnes swipes the back of his right hand across his jaw and glances at the blood it collects. He decides right then.

"Jesus, Barn—"

"We're not going back."

Nothing is stopping Steve from finding his way back, not anymore. Barnes won't leave him to do it alone.

***

Sam's duffel bag drops onto the red tile floor. "This is it? Home sweet home?"

Barnes shrugs. He'd rather be in Europe. Sweden, maybe. Somewhere cool and overcast.

There's nothing wrong with Brazil: it's beautiful, scenic, and doesn't rattle any bells in his head. He just doesn't like sticky, humid tropical weather.

Barnes looks behind his hologrammed shoulder at Steve, who's hanging back at the front door. Hesitation is written into every bone in his body. His right hand is wrapped around the black strap of his bag, knuckles white.

Decades ago, he'd looked the same way, when he'd moved into Bucky's Brooklyn apartment. It'd taken  _weeks,_  before it sunk in that it was Steve's place, too.

Barnes misses the time when the helicarrier and his own inability to make a move were the biggest obstacles between them. That's saying something.

Steve's eyes shift to him. "I want to  _go_  home."

"No," Barnes says, before Sam can do more than open his mouth. "We're staying, until Nat gives us the all clear."

Steve doesn't give up anything: not anger, not frustration, not acceptance. Knuckles still white, he finally moves further into the foyer, then past Barnes, and then turns toward a hallway that probably leads to the bedrooms.

Not a word. Nothing.

Barnes takes the few steps to the living room, sinks into a cracked brown leather sofa, and looks at the beige stucco wall. A framed photo of a tacky pineapple hangs crookedly, while a green, plastic crocodile clock shifts its tail side-to-side with every  _tick, tick, tick_.

Who the hell at SHIELD is in charge of replacing safe house batteries, he wonders.

Behind him, he hears Sam's footsteps: slow, unsure. It's not long before Sam comes into view and then drops into a gray microfiber chair at a right angle from the couch.

"Are  _you_  ready for this?" Sam asks. "Hotel's one thing. This place is small."

Barnes shakes his head and lets out a deep breath. "After Kraków, I almost turned back and tried to find him. If I had—"

"Don't," Sam interrupts, firm, "go down that path. HYDRA was gonna do this, no matter what you did."

He nods, not because he believes it. "Thanks for being here."

"Wouldn't be anywhere else."

From Sam, he believes it.

***

The gunshot isn't as loud as it should have been. He feels it in the way there's no breath left in his body, in the way the world tumbles out of control. He's on the ground before he knows it, his body prickly cold except for the warmth spreading through his chest.

A handful of words come to mind:  _the Winter is warm_  and  _fuck_.

Steve stands above him, gun aimed. Barnes tries to say "it's not your fault" but all that comes out are violent coughs and what tastes like blood.

He doesn't hear the second gunshot, but he sees the world bleed black inside of a second. The inky swirls of it disperse into sunlit, transparent clouds, far above the exposed innards of a helicarrier. As he falls, he glimpses the metal catwalk, the control relay, and tendril-like flashes of yellow-orange – dreamscape fire and explosions.

He falls, like he's fallen before, in his dreams and nightmares, down, down, down, until he hits the water like concrete. It's almost as if his chest cracks in half and dumps out of all of his blood, for all that he can see through the dark, murky waters of the Potomac.

But he sees enough: red, white, and blue sinking down, down, down, until all he sees is a shock of blond hair, and then nothing but wavy, rippling water.

Barnes dives, no breath to hold, no life to give – but one to save. He kicks himself down, down, down, fingers outstretched, reaching, grasping and finding nothing.

The currents of the river rush against his ears, and he can't hear Steve's heartbeat. He can't breathe, can't smell Steve's blood. His mouth opens, empty and hollow air bubbles escaping with his frantic, "Steve!"

Down, down, down, deeper and deeper, finding only handfuls of water. Seeing only murky black ink, the world bled dry.

 _Steve_.

His fingers brush by something short and soft: hair. He grasps as much of it as he can, pulls, and holds Steve's limp body against his own. He kicks and kicks, up and up, toward rippling darkness.

Together, they break the surface of the river – but Steve is limp, not breathing or coughing, and it's almost too much to pull his dead weight to the shore of gray cobblestone, red tulips, and too-long blades of grass. Shakespeare Garden.

Breathless, Barnes pants over Steve's pale, soggy body, tasting sweet scents of flowers and crisp earthiness of autumn leaves with every gulped breath. Blood drips onto Steve's face, barely perceptible in the darkness.

"Steve," he begs. "Steve, please."

He fervently pounds compressions into Steve's chest and desperately gives Steve oxygen Barnes doesn't have to give.

"Steve. Please. I—"

A gunshot isn't as loud as it should have been. He feels it in the way there's no breath left in his body, in the way the world tumbles out of control. He's on the ground before he knows it, his body prickly cold except for the warmth spreading through his chest.

The sun shines over a blue-sky garden, rolling clouds stacked like glaciers. Crinkling, orange leaves rattle overhead, while pink cherry blossoms float between bursts of warm wind. Grass scratches at his bare arm.

Lips tinged blue, skin sallow and soggy, Steve stands above him, gun aimed. Barnes tries to say "it's not your fault" but all that comes out are violent coughs and what tastes like blood.

The third bullet doesn't come. The Man and the Woman do - from the cosmodrome – neatly stepping up on either side of Steve, who accepts them, doesn't fight them. They have Steve - who none of this was ever supposed to have touched.

Barnes tries to say "Steve, shoot them," but all that comes out are violent coughs and what tastes--

"He's actually asleep. Wow."

Barnes opens his eyes: his breaths calm, his voice silent, his body fucking surging with adrenaline and fear, and his heart skipping, skipping, skipping. He doesn't move, although his blanket is drenched with sweat and tangled uncomfortably around his body. The skin of his right arm sticks to the leather couch.

Steve grunts.

Running shoe soles squeak against the tile.

"Remember: you're my partner. You run  _with_ me."

"You can try running with  _me_?"

"Oh, you're funny, except for the funny part."

The front door opens and then shuts. He hears the sound of shoes pattering across asphalt, and, then, about a block down, he hears Steve say "on your left" and Sam answer "don't you start." They fade from earshot, which means: they're gone.

Barnes rolls off of the couch and lands back-flat on the generously cold floor. His heart won't slow down, and he gives into the panic: breaths heavy, body flashing with sweat, head rolling in lightheaded loops.

 _Calm down. It didn't happen_.

"Calm down. Calm down. Calm down."

It doesn't help.

His right hand flops to his chest; his shirt is damp with sweat, no bullet holes. His arm isn't covered in needle-pricks. Steve is alive, not shot, stabbed, drowned, and killed. He's in Brazil, not in the cobblestone Shakespeare Garden or sweltering Death Valley.

It didn't happen.

He wraps his arms around himself, tight, and waits for the anxiety and panic and dread to pass. It's not so easy, not with a sprinting, ceaseless mind. It bounds and leaps and soars, until it finds one place where it can take that one awful step.

Back to the room. Back to Steve, with the CZ-75. Back to the gunshot, and then the two that followed. He imagines what it was like lying dead on the floor, when Sam and Natasha found them. He thinks of HYDRA storming the hospital, getting close enough to inject his body with their new serum, to nearly finish a plan to keep Steve and take him back. His brain takes the step: it almost happened.

It almost happened.

 _It almost happened_.

It's only taken him seven months to figure that out.

The wooden feet of the coffee table  _screech_  across the tile floor. A knee digs against his stomach. Fingers press against his throat, and he catches the wrist those fingers belong to.

"Hey." Sam. "Talk to me."

He opens his eyes. His chest feels hollow. The room seems small and faraway. He can barely breathe.

"Barnes. Talk."

Sam's face is flushed and sweaty from a long run, twisted from worry. His voice is distant.

"Had a dream," he manages to say.

"A memory?"

"No. It almost happened."

Sam's worry fades to confusion. "What—" His face steels, the change in expression surreal. He's like a Flannel Face toy from the '40's and what a stupid thing to think about right now. "It didn't. You're here. You're safe."

His heart's beating so quickly and so out of sync with the rest of his body that it  _hurts_.

"Breathe. Okay? Breathe."

Barnes blinks, looks past Sam, and sees Steve: expression blank, arms limp at his side. He blinks again and, for a piece of a second, sees Steve from that room in Death Valley: victory bleeding to blankness, left arm limp at his side, right hand rattling a handgun.

He sits up, shoving Sam away, eyes stuck on Steve.

"You okay?" Steve asks, tone flat. He might as well have said "fuck you."

"Your pulse is off the charts, even for you. Lay down." Sam.

"You're a social worker, not a fucking doctor," Barnes snaps, breathless and sounding like it.

"Back to that. Okay."

A spot on his thigh suddenly goes cold; Barnes looks down and sees Sam's handing moving away from it.

That's okay. He's done with this, anyway.

Barnes grabs his phone from between two couch cushions, climbs to his shaky feet, and focuses on getting to his bedroom. If Sam or Steve say anything, he doesn't hear them.

The moment he's in his room, he shuts the door with his foot and calls Natasha.

He presses his phone tightly against his cheek and ear. It rings and rings and, instead of her voice cutting in, he hears three beeps and " _lamentamos mas a sua chamada não pode ser completada."_

He dials, again and again and again, the same three beeps and the same message, over and over and over again.

He nearly throws the phone at the wall. Instead, he takes a deep, shuddering breath, phone clenched in both hands up by his face, and he tries to calm, calm, calm down.  _Calm_.

The world's caving in, and he's paralyzed. She would say, "that's the anxiety talking; you know it will pass," and he would curl up next to her, only with her, and let her chase that anxiety away, only her with that vulnerability weaved in her hands.

Barnes lays down on the bed, with its dusty, stale sheets, pulls a flat pillow to his stomach, and thinks and breathes: one, two, three, black. One, two, three, red. One, two, three, black. One, two, three, red.

Until his mind slows down from a panicked dash to a sluggish crawl, and the barbs of fear and anxiety untangle and unwind.

HYDRA still does it for him, every time.

 _Knock, knock, knock_. "Barnes?"

A deep breath.  _Center_.  _Stay centered_.

"I'm good," he answers.

He wishes he could talk it out with Natasha. Speak his fear that he's doing this for Steve but that Steve triggers him as much as he triggers Steve, and if that's true –

If they have no future.

If they'll ever go as far as a brutal fight on a helicarrier, a manufactured, manipulative argument in Kraków, Poland, and a cold room under Death Valley's scorched sand.

Those are pretty solid  _ifs_.

***

 _Rap, rap, rap._  "Barnes?"

"I'm good."

In the kitchen, Steve gulps a glass of orange juice – all pulp, no sugar, a different taste than he's used to, and it might be ridiculous that he's thinking about different flavors of orange juice, when Bucky's a mess.

He hears Sam's footsteps coming toward the kitchen, back from the bedroom. He waits until he senses Sam enter the doorway, before he turns and asks, "Is he always like that?"

Sam crosses his arms around his chest and leans against the door frame. "No."

Steve wipes orange juice from his upper lip, waiting for Sam to say more.

"I lived with him for over two months, and he never showed it. Not random like that."

Steve considers that and quashes the handful of questions he thinks to ask – most of them about those two months. About how they'd gotten so close.

A pang of jealousy shoots through his gut, but he ignores it, because he has to.

He'd sensed that they'd become friends, from the way Sam talked about Bucky: no animosity, no doubts, only affection. Now seeing it for himself: the nonverbal communication – how Sam can read Bucky in ways that Steve can't anymore; the bickering and teasing; and even how they stand so closely together, familiar inside each other's personal space.

That's good – is what he tells himself.

"It's me" is what's true, and Steve says it.  _He_  is what Bucky's scared of.  _He_  is what's knocking Bucky back down.

"I doubt that."

Steve corrects himself. "It's what I did."

"It's what  _HYDRA_ did."

He's about to argue, when Sam lifts a finger, warning all over his face.

"When it was Barnes, all you could say was how it was HYDRA this, HYDRA that. Not him. And you were right. So. Let's talk about how that applies to you."

It –

Steve shuts his eyes. He can see more than that room. He sees dull, brown eyes, over and over again, and remembers the pull of  _sleep, sleep, sleep_. He presses his palms into his eyes: tries to push away the heaviness, the itching, the images. He knows now that he'd killed a lot of people wearing photostatic veils, but –

That doesn't change the conditioning of  _Bucky dead_  meaning  _good things happening_.

"I should have fought harder," Steve says, only because he trusts Sam with it. "Held on longer."

Steve opens his eyes, in time to see Sam shrug.

"I guess he should've, too." Another shrug. "It's a two-way road."

He knows that Sam means well and can only work with what he thinks he knows. That road isn't so simple as "two-way" or "one-way." It's not so black and white, and Steve knows, because he remembers believing it, too.

Steve nods instead of trying to explain it. "Yeah."

***

Late the next morning, it's 28 Celsius with the cool ocean wind blowing through the back patio. Shards of blue sky trickle through the green, leafy branches of a small thicket of trees and overgrown weeds.

Barnes finds Steve sitting in a wooden deck chair, long legs stretched out, bare feet flat on the brown terracotta tile. He's got his khakis rolled up to his calves; Barnes can see faint hints of scars around both of his ankles.

Scars take some doing. A lot of fucking doing.

Steve's neck is stretched down toward a thin, black tablet. The way he moves the stylus across the screen is fervently focused, almost like he's drawing.

"Hey," Barnes greets, infusing as much false confidence into that one word as he can. His mission is to strive for normalcy—as if he even knows what that is. "What're you doin'?"

Steve's shoulders draw up and tense, almost imperceptibly. In the middle of a stroke of the stylus, his hand stops moving.

If the Man or the Woman came up behind him, and if one of them started a casual conversation with him, he'd do more than draw up his shoulders. As much as he'd like to think he would get up and kill them, he'd probably settle for having a(nother) nervous breakdown.

Without much difficulty, he imagines that it must be the same way for Steve. He also imagines "it wasn't me" doesn't go very far. It was Barnes' voice and his face and that's all that matters.

"Drawing," Steve finally answers. "It's a graphics tablet. Sharon makes me use it."

Barnes pulls a thread. "'Makes you'? What does that even look like?"

A smile pulls at Steve's lips. "I mean, it's not paper, but – I like using it."

_Keep it going._

"What're you drawing?"

The smile disappears. The screen goes black after an intentional press of Steve's index finger. "Nothing."

He means "it's private." Steve never shared his work with anyone. He wouldn't draw if someone else had the barest line of sight, with one unfailing exception: Bucky.

"I had every chance, and I'm so fucking sorry" are words that don't leave his mouth, no matter how loudly they're screaming to be said.

"Okay. The tablet's really neat" is what Barnes says instead, before he turns away and walks back inside.

Sam sits at the small island in the kitchen, sipping at a sweating can of Pepsi and reading a regular old newspaper.

Barnes almost walks past him, but, at the last moment, stops, arms crossed around his chest. Errantly, he thinks it's still so weird to see skin instead of metal. He doesn't like it.

"I think – I think I'm making it worse. What if I—"

Sam doesn't even look up from the paper. "No."

"Sam."

"How long did it take you?" Sam asks, still without looking up. "To even start thinking straight?"

Nazarri's lab. The leaning white shed. Begging HYDRA to take him back, yearning to "go home," and killing them all anyway. Withdrawal and hallucinations in the boat. Every time his brain shut down and blacked out. Until his thoughts started to come together, and then most of the person he is today slowly started to crawl through, right before Hill and Fury decided what to do with him.

Not even then, though, had he been thinking straight. Not when blowing up a building had been a good plan, even if he'd never even gotten close to doing it. He thinks back and back, trying to pinpoint a moment, or a day, or even a week, when he could say "that's when it clicked."

It'd clicked, when he stopped killing: when he left a base in the middle of a hit and left that twisted world behind.

"Almost a year."

Five months to have some semblance of clarity of thought. Ten, eleven months to comprehend that he wanted to do more than circle HYDRA like a crazy fucking wasp buzzing a soda can. More than a year after that, before his emotions started to catch up, and even longer after that, before he could feel those emotions behind the memories.

Sam's eyebrows shoot up, and he frowns, like a caricature. "And that was a clean break. Steve's spent seven months being brainwashed by his therapist. It's not you. He loves the fuck out of you."

That might have been true before, but not anymore. " _Before —"_

Sam looks up. "No. Trust me. Still. How are you doing?"

Barnes lifts a shoulder. He's doing. He hadn't slept last night – started a new Michael Crichton book, clicked through Wikipedia – so.

The look on Sam's face says,  _I have shit to say to you_ , but his eyes go back to the newspaper. Sam looks older: tired, stressed. He's here, instead of living his own life; that's dangerous.

"How are  _you_  doing?" Barnes asks, tapping into an emotional energy not often used. It's rusty, and probably real shitty, but it's less than fair that Sam gets dragged along for these rides.

Sam's eyes flick up, surprise in his expression. "I'm good."

"Can I give you advice? That you take for whatever you think it's worth?"

That surprise grows. "Shoot."

Barnes hesitates, grabbing words before they disappear, and somehow strings together something decent, something honest. "This is what we do. We support each other until we burn. Don't sacrifice yourself for us. Don't burn. If you keep going like this, you will."

Sam chuckles: strung-out, sad. "My best friend, my wing man, got shot out of the sky right in front of me. RPG. All I could do was watch." That strung-out smile fades to a grimaced frown. "Now him. Just slower."

"I didn't know that" is all Barnes can think to say.

"Never told you. It was a while ago. Never leaves you, you know?"

He can think of people – people he'd loved, people he'd liked, people he'd hated. Long ago, back then, he remembers learning that no one's forever and people aren't guaranteed.

A little later, learning: nothing's guaranteed.

Nothing.

***

One by one, the reams of overhead lights  _sizzle_  to life, the ones nearest him first. The last two, twenty meters away, illuminate a black, metal cylinder shrouded by thick, black cords and tubes.

He takes a step forward, compelled further and further toward it. Over the sound of his own, harsh breaths, he can't hear the smooth  _hum_  of its motors. Even still, the memory of the sound of those motors—their vibration against his back—is as good as hearing it.

He knows what it is.

He swallows, spit catching in the back of his tight, dry throat. His face prickles. His stomach coils. His hands—both of them—tremble.

He looks at his left hand: skin, veins, pores, scars. He thinks to turn off the hologram, but it doesn't deactivate. With his right hand, he pinches the skin of his left hand: it hurts. It's real.

 _What the fuck_.

"Buck!"

Behind him.

He turns and sees Steve—small Steve, in brown trousers and gray suspenders—tossing and catching a baseball. Straight up, straight down, over and over again.

"Buck, c'mon. We gonna play or what?"

"No. Get outta here."

"What, you afraid you can't hit? Just a couple throws."

_Hissssss._

Hydraulics  _purr_.

 _Whoosh_.

Cherry-blossom, autumn-infused air breezes against his back.

He turns back around, ignoring Steve, and, every part of him a fiery, paralyzed knot, watches the cryo door lift upward. The opaque fog of ice dissipates amidst leaning red tulips, a gray cobblestone pathway, and a deep blue sky of glacier clouds.

He sees black combat pants, all he ever wore. A black vest and naked right arm, riddled with blue-lit sensors and prickly wires, to make sure he didn't somehow die inside the tank. An IV taped to his right hand, always –  _a_   _very specific combination of drugs_. A black mask, almost like the one he wore during missions. Long, icy hair. Dead eyes.

He can't move. But he can still talk. "Steve. Run."

_POCK!_

A baseball hits the outside wall of the cryo chamber:  _plonk_.

_POCK!_

Another one hits the Winter Soldier's left arm:  _plonk_.

He pushes through his fear and spins around, mouth open to scream at Steve to  _fucking stop are you fucking nuts run!_

It's not Steve.

It's  _Anna_ : red curly hair, brown eyes, dark freckles across her cheeks. So young. So clueless. So gone. It's Anna, tossing up baseball after baseball, striking each one with a wooden Orion baseball bat, with sandlot-honed form.

 _POCK! Plonk. POCK! Plonk. POCK! Plonk_.

"You should run, too," he urges, knowing she's dead but, somehow, in this dream, that not really mattering much. "We should both—"

Anna doesn't stop throwing and hitting, but she shakes her head and sighs, familiar exasperation all over her face. "You'll both be all right, James."

_POCK! Plonk._

"What?" he asks, dumbly. "Anna, he's com—"

 _Plonk, plonk_.

Red mist sprays the floor behind Anna's head. A perfect, round hole is gouged into her forehead, a fine trickle of blood running past her nose. She crumples to the ground and disappears in a burst of yellow-orange dust.

He turns around and sees the Winter Soldier, somehow different now. A black t-shirt, black tactical pants, untied boots, short hair, and no mask. Bruises ring his wrist and color his cheekbones. The only part about him that's right is the SIG Sauer in his left hand, aimed.

The Winter Soldier strides forward, calm, even, not fast and not slow. He remembers what it was like – how HYDRA'd suppressed his fright/flight instinct.  _Fight_  was fucking it.

Barnes doesn't move, feet planted and as good as glued and screwed. He doesn't know if he can't move or won't move, if he's terrified or if he's calm.

He looks to the black luminaire, then to the brass fountain where Becca'd split her lip. Small songbirds flutter and sing. The midday sun warms his face, while the lukewarm breeze slips around his skin.

He could stay here forever, even with –

The sidearm drops to the cobblestone path. The Winter Soldier keeps striding.

In 2014, he couldn't pick himself out of a photograph. He'd stared at a museum memorial and convinced his brain to link "James Barnes" with a stranger's image on a wall. He'd studied his reflection—in windows, in mirrors, in puddles—and still saw a stranger. That's an important bit of history.

Face-to-face with the worst, lost version of himself, he says, "Remember this place?"

The Winter Soldier's left hand wraps around Barnes' right, and it's nothing the way he  _snaps, snaps_  the wrist bones, and it's nothing the way the metal fingers dig into his skin, crushing veins and –

Barnes opens his eyes to darkness and  _agony_ in his right arm. He lays flat on his back, willing away the sick remnants of that dream-like nightmare.

_Not real. Not real. Not real._

He can still feel the way his bones snapped. Can still feel the pressured tearing. Can still smell blood. Exactly like the cosmodrome.

A creepy-crawling sensation runs down his chest, then another and another. He goes to itch that feeling away, when he feels an unrelenting pressure wrapped around his forearm.

Barnes looks down, his eyes adjusting to the dark, and he sees the outline: his left hand wrapped around his right forearm, his forearm laying over his chest. His left fingers snap up and pull away from his right arm, taking with them skin and blood.

There's so much blood.

_Fucking Christ._

Mind spinning with hazy panic, Barnes sits up, gets out of bed, and walks calmly to the hallway bathroom. He keeps his right arm at chest-level, cradled there, blood spilling down the bare skin of his chest and abdomen.

With his left elbow, he turns on the bathroom light and nudges the door closed with his right foot.

Red droplets splash against the red tile floor.

He grabs a yellowed towel from a shelf and holds it under his arm.

He sits down on the floor, back pressed against the wall, and looks.

His forearm is broken. His fingertips are blue, fingers stuffy and hard to move. There are four deep gouges on the inner side of his arm, violent bruises already coloring his skin purple. On the vein-ridden, fleshy underside of his arm, the skin is deeply torn and bleeding like hell.

It's bad. It's really, really bad.

He can hear the crackling, high-pitched  _buzz_  of the overhead light.

He can hear water trickle through pipes.

He can hear the sound of his own rapid breaths.

He can feel too-hot sweat flash and prickle against his skin.

Sharp pains shoot through his chest.

He closes his eyes and resolves to  _just get through this_ : set the bones, sew up the gouges, throw on a black jacket, clean the floor, and let it heal. Steve and Sam will never know.

That's the plan.

He opens his eyes and, for the umpteenth time, wishes he had his real left arm – the one that could feel.

He wraps his left hand around his right arm, sucks in a quiet, deep breath at the excruciating pain even that causes, and feels out the break, using his left hand to make pain for his right arm.

It's a bad break.

It's –

 _Click_.

Barnes turns his head toward the door. It opens, and Sam, wearing only a pair of boxers, steps in, bleary-eyed.

"What—" Sam blinks, and his face steels. He stands there and stares for many, many long, long moments.

"I had a dream," Barnes offers, as if that explains this whole mess. "I didn't mean to do it."

Sam nods. "You seen a medical kit around here?"

"Kitchen, far right cabinet."

Sam nods again. "Don't move."

He won't. As Sam walks out of the bathroom, Barnes looks down at the floor, then closes his eyes so he doesn't have to look at the splotches of blood.

He hears the cabinet  _squeak_  open, the  _scrape_  of plastic on wood, and then the hollow  _slap_  as Sam closes the cabinet door. He hears drawers  _slide_ open and then closed, little plastic wheels tearing down up and down metal tracks, and the sound of rummaging. He hears Sam's quiet, bare footsteps against the tile floors, and opens his eyes a few moments before Sam steps back into the bathroom, a med kit and two wooden spoons in his hands.

Wordlessly, Sam sits across from Barnes and takes his arm into his hands. Even that small movement is excruciating, and a hiss of breath escapes his mouth before he can bite it back.

Sam's eyebrows pull together, panicked. "I'm sorry."

Barnes shakes his head once, because it hurts to move. "No, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Don't be." Sam takes a huge breath, nods, and warns, "This is gonna hurt."

Last time, after the cosmodrome, it'd felt like Natasha was tearing his arm off. This time, he waits for it, relaxing his body. "I know."

When Sam straightens his arm, it's agony, and when Sam pulls and pulls with his right hand, his left pushing against Barnes' shoulder, it feels like his arm is being ripped apart, tendrils of fire and red-hot blades cutting through the nerves and muscles.

Every bit of training tells him to  _don't move, don't make a sound, don't blink, breathe normally_. That conditioning works for the first, endless twenty seconds, but Sam keeps pulling, and, god damn it, he's  _not_ the Winter Soldier anymore, and he doesn't have to pretend.

He screws his face up, body shaking, and sucks in a deep, trembling breath, tears in his eyes. He closes them tight and tries not to scream—tries not to wake up Steve, or make Sam feel bad for doing a good job.

Finally, he feels the first bone align, and, five eternal seconds after that, he feels the second bone slip into place. The pressure in his numb fingers alleviates.

Boneless—or wishing he was—Barnes falls back against the wall, puts his weight onto his left arm, and lets his body tremble and tumble into a cold sweat, exhausted and drained.

"Are you okay?"

He shakes his head "no."

"Okay. I'm gonna put an ice bag on your arm. You need stitches."

He nods his head "yes," the back of his hair rubbing against the wall. He can hear snaps of static.

A cold, plastic bag wraps gently around his forearm. It doesn't feel good or bad. His stomach rolls.

He hears Sam rummage in the kit and knows exactly when he finds the suture thread and needle.

"I need you to hold the bag, B."

Barnes doesn't comment on the new nickname. He readjusts his body, putting his full weight against the wall, and, eyes still closed, holds the ice bag in place with his left hand.

"You ready?"

Barnes nods, and, not even two seconds later, feels the hooked needle pierce his skin. He doesn't watch.

"What was the dream?"

He's not afraid to tell Sam. "Winter Soldier. Couldn't stop'em. He broke my arm." Barnes doesn't pretend that it doesn't sound ridiculous. "It's stupid."

"It's not stupid," Sam replies, like he believes it. "Is this the first time since Russia?"

"Yeah. I thought it'd be easy by now."

His voice cracks at the end, and that's okay. There are tears leaking out of his eyes, and those are okay, too. Sam's seen everything, and Sam's still here. He opens his eyes to wipe the tears away, but remembers that he doesn't have the resources to do that.

Sam's eyes flick up. " _You_  don't make it easy. I've told you that before. You don't listen."

Harsh words, said kindly.

"You have a home with us. You have a team. You have friends. People who'd—"

Oh, and there it is. Sam catches it, knows it before he says it, but it's too fucking late to stop there.

"What – die for me?" Barnes leaves the rest unspoken:  _Enough people have died for me._

A weaker person would shirk away and stop right there. Sam's not weak. Sam knows who he is, knows what he believes, and never backs down. He's an asshole.

"Help you," Sam corrects, each word pronounced sharply. "You don't survive Death Valley and just get over it. You seeing him, him seeing you—"

Sam sighs hard and doesn't finish that thought. He shakes his head and loops another suture. "I can't change how you think."

Even six months ago, he would have lashed out, defensive. He thinks about it – thinks about saying "you must not be very good at your job" or "great, you want me to get help from Steve's evil HYDRA therapist" – but stomps both thoughts dead.

"I know," he says instead, as loud as an exhaled breath.

Sam pauses mid-stitch, and Barnes doesn't look at him to see why. He closes his eyes again and wills this to be over, so Sam can go back to bed and Barnes can go do something that's not this.

The needle pulls, then pierces more skin. "You trained sharpshooters during the war, right?"

A couple. Back then, they called him one of the longest surviving and, more importantly, one of the most accurate marksmen. Even then, he didn't fail. The Army didn't ignore things like that.

"Yeah," he answers. "A couple, here and there."

"You trained Steve?"

At Goldie's Gym, before the Army laughed in Steve's face a half dozen times. During the War, because, although Bucky hated what Steve had done to himself, he'd only wanted to see Steve succeed.

"A little."

"He says a lot."

He shrugs with his left shoulder. There's a reason why Steve survived their fights on the highway and the helicarrier, when not a whole hell of a lot of other people on this planet could've.

"You know they're stretched thin, right? They can barely keep up. Rebuilding's not easy, not with all this. Not with all the missions they have to run. A couple of organizations are trying to fill HYDRA's void, even while HYDRA's growing faster and faster. SHIELD could really use someone. A trainer. A pilot."

Barnes glances at his arm and sees that there's still a long way to go.  _Fuck_.

Sam moves his left hand and the bag of ice, then starts suturing another gouge. "Are we not talking?"

"Okay. So. What am I gonna do – tell'em that sometimes I destroy my arm, but don't worry about it?"

"You start slow and get better. That's what you do."

"Not gonna happen."

Sam cocks his head, eyes still somehow focused on the needle and thread. "Okay, I'm gonna therapy you for ten seconds, and that's it. It takes about a year,  _entirely_  removed from trauma, before a person starts to heal."

It's too heavy. It's too much. It's – "That wasn't ten seconds. You're a rip off."

"You're a fucking dick," Sam laughs, and Barnes has missed this. He's missed  _Sam_. "Also, this is going to hurt."

It's Sam turning his arm over, bottom side up, and it does hurt. It brings back the cold sweat and the hot prickles and the too-fast breaths. He clenches his jaw and rides through it.

"It's almost done."

He knows that.

He watches Sam inspect the damage, so much worse on the underside, and watches Sam's face fall, and Barnes knows that Sam has no idea what to do. Not with the crushed veins, bone-deep hole, seeping blood, and bruising as deep purple as bruises come.

Sam wipes away what he can with a stinging alcohol pad, but that doesn't do a lot.

"It'll heal," Barnes assures, even though he sees the problem: not enough skin to do any stitching. So, it'll be the grosser route. "There's gauze. Pack it in."

Sam packs it in, while Barnes pushes his face into his left shoulder.

Sam says, "Hold," and Barnes supports the weight of his right arm with his left, ice bag resting on his knee.

Finally, he feels thin gauze start to be wrapped around his arm, then those stupid spoons, more gauze, then tape, and then the ice bag. The throbbing stabs fade to throbbing aches.

He opens his eyes and sees Sam stand, grab a small towel, drench it in warm water, and hold it out for Barnes to take. There's blood all over his body. While Sam slides latex gloves off his hands and washes his own self up, Barnes wipes away the blood on his chest, legs, and, painstakingly, his left arm.

Sam is mopping the floor with another towel and his foot, when Barnes thinks to say, "I'm sorry" – again. "Thanks for doing this."

Tiredness in his eyes, Sam replies, "I've seen you dead. This is nothing. But you're welcome. All you had to do was ask."

Those words catch him by surprise. It's easy for him to forget that his three closest friends lived that. He ignores the twisting emotions those thoughts bring and surveys the three bloody towels, the red-stained latex gloves, the extra thread. The metallic smell of his blood hangs heavy in the air.

All he has to do is ask.

"We're here for Steve. He can't know about this. Can you throw all this stuff away somewhere else? Don't tell him?"

Sam hesitates for a quick moment. "Not telling Steve. Can you hide it that long?"

Broken arm, bouncy C-17. Can do.

***

The only issue with "don't tell Steve" is that Steve has a super serumed nose.

Early the next morning, right before he sticks his head into the refrigerator, Steve complains, "This whole place smells like blood."

Barnes goes for razzle-dazzle (protip: actual military term). "I'm on my period," he says, then takes a bite of avocado-slathered toast.

It sounds like Steve hits his head on one of the refrigerator's shelves; he's so far in, the god damn thing must be the doorway to Narnia.

That's the only reaction Barnes notices. He focuses on his tablet, where he's reading  _Jurassic Park_ , and gets his head back into the story.

He actually doesn't like the book – way too much of it hits way too close to home, with things like "all major changes are like death; you can't see to the other side until you're there" and "living systems are inherently unstable; they may seem stable but they're not – everything is on the edge of collapse." In any case, Hammond is being a grade A fuckface for the twentieth time, when glass shatters.

Barnes doesn't react. He only moves his eyes to Steve. The jagged bottom of a drinking glass is clenched in Steve's right hand, the sticky pulp of spilled orange juice coating his skin. The look on his face is –

Barnes goes back to his tablet, heart racing, intent to not show it. The screen is an unreadable blur.

He hears Sam get out of bed, everything quick: covers shifted, feet on floor, door opening, footsteps pattering down the short hallway.

"Look at me."

Barnes does and sees the same person from inside that room in Death Valley. He knows what it's like: wires crossing, mazes in his brain, thoughts that  _won't_ make sense. But - he'd had mostly balanced instincts, and they'd mostly guided him through those irrational times. He doesn't see the same from Steve. He sees someone whose every system is running out of sync.

"You—" Steve says only that word.

"The glass'll just break." Like the beer bottle and the ceramic knives. "What're you doing?"

The bottom of the glass crunches against the wall, and Sam, who'd a moment ago entered the kitchen, yelps, arms curled protectively over his head. Blood beads along his forearm and smears on the floor.

"What the  _fuck?!_ "

Barnes thinks it's the first time he's ever heard Sam yell.

With the left sleeve of his jacket, Barnes wipes orange juice from his face. He's got a broken right arm and a left one designed to kill. If Steve really goes off, one of them will be done.

"Sam—" Steve, sounding small, looking mortified. "I'm…"

Sam pulls his bent, right arm up, twisting it to see the cut along his elbow. He shakes his head, face contorted with barely restrained anger.

"How many times," Sam says, not asks.

Barnes doesn't know what that means.

Steve opens his mouth, then closes it again.

Barnes wants to help Sam, like Sam had helped him last night, but that means leaving Steve alone here. Instead of doing anything, he turns his attention back to the blurry words on the tablet, pretending to read.

Steve and Sam stand opposite each other, meters between them, mired in a silent battle of wills.

"I can't control it," Steve finally says.

He can't control it, because HYDRA hadn't been done with him. They'd torn him down, made him do something terrible, and never had the chance to finish the break and build him back up. His therapist had been dragging him in intentional circles.

A sick, sick thought comes next.

If HYDRA had taught him anything, it was how to control their chaos inside his mind. How to ignore the slivers of memories; how to push past the nagging, horrible feelings of  _wrong disgusting bad evil don't don't don't don't do this_ ; how to function and exist within their dream.

For decades, it'd mostly worked, until it all crumbled away, and they took back the fragment of autonomy they'd allowed him. But. It'd  _worked_ , for long enough, and it works, to this day, when he lets it.

He flinches, but he says the words that make him sick to his stomach: "I can show you how."

He'd showed Natasha, and all the other Black Widows. He'd showed countless Soviet operatives. He'd built HYDRA's arsenal.

Two sets of eyes turn to him.

"I can't ask you to do that," Steve says, yet another switch flipped, this one back to Steve's normal. Steve's  _managing_  him – or, at least, trying to.

 _Do you hear yourself?_  Barnes wants to ask, but it's too adversarial. "Up to you."

***

Couch cushions on the floor, like when they were kids. Side by side, like always.

"Breathe."

"That's the trick?" Steve asks.

"You're not breathing."

"I'm sorry for—"

" _Breathe_ ," Bucky snaps.

Steve clutches the sides of the leather cushion, takes a deep breath, and lets it back out. It feels like breathing: it doesn't feel helpful, it doesn't feel good, it doesn't feel right.

"That's 'one.' Breathe."

"Meditation? Buck. C'mon."

Bucky sighs hard and glares at him, like back in the day, when Bucky'd been trying to read a book and all Steve wanted to do was talk.

"It's not meditation. It's about shutting down your mind."

Steve would prefer meditation. There's nothing he wants to do less than have Bucky teach him HYDRA's brainwashing –

 _Stop_.

He can't stop.

"Is this what he would've done next?" Steve asks.

"Yeah. It's what they'd do next," Bucky answers, sure and calm. "Think of it like sparring. Having control of yourself. Because, if you don't, you lose."

"Do I close my eyes?"

"I don't. I find a point and look at it. Like the crack in that wall. Anything."

Steve sees it: the crack in the plaster, left of the blank TV. He traces its short, jagged path up the beige wall.

"Breathe."

Steve takes another deep breath, lets it back out.  _One_.

"That's one. Breathe."

Another deep breath, in and back out.  _Two_.

"That's two. Br—"

Steve wonders: "When did you first learn this?"

Another hard sigh. "Steve. You're not focusing."

He has a thousand questions, years and years to catch up on, and he can't  _sit here_  and  _breathe_. Bucky's  _here_.

"When?" Steve presses.

"When I was cutting my arm open and wasn't allowed to make a sound. Breathe."

The only person who breathes is Sam, and he breathes, " _Jesus_ ," from his spot on the only cushion left on the sofa.

Steve stares, and Bucky stares back. The file had said "the subject self-mutilated for four hours, before breaking protocol." Steve doesn't know what he'd thought that meant. Hearing it – he realizes that they would have made Bucky do it, no matter how long it took, until he "broke protocol."

They'd done that to his friend. To  _Bucky_.

 _Seventy years_.

Steve takes a deep breath: in, out, shaking.

"Good. That's one. Make it to three."

He makes it to three, eyes open and staring at the crack, because, if he closes his eyes, he sees red.

"And then you think 'black.' Start back over at 'one.' Breathe."

He makes it to one and a half, before another thought scampers across his mind. "How are you  _you_? After all that?"

_Why aren't I me?_

"Steve—" Sam had promised not to get involved, only to watch and make sure they both stayed safe.

"I don't know," Bucky replies, superficial patience drenching his tone. He's irritated, like when Steve wouldn't answer, and the other Bucky would find a knife, a gun, or a – "I need you to focus, before you hurt someone again."

_Hurt._

A thought curls around his brain, tighter and tighter, a garrote. It splinters into more: the butterfly-bitted drill, the serrated-edged knives, the hot needles, the searing poison, the fire scorching his skin, the metal-fisted beatings.

_Hurt._

His fingernails dig into the skin of his palms, tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, and all he can hear is a flood of white sound, and, when the violent red clears from his vision, he sees Bucky flat on his back, writhing on the floor, his left hand indecisively hovering over his right arm, back and forth back and forth back and forth, before he finally smashes it into the floor.

Pieces and splinters of red tile burst into the air and scatter across the floor.

Sam's on his knees, next to that arm, saying words that Steve can't hear. His fingers are hidden in Bucky's short hair.

"What happened?" Steve thinks he says, his own voice lost to white sound. "Bucky?"

Sam shakes his head. Bucky's knees draw up; his socks have hands making middle fingers on them.

Steve can't remember what just happened, but he thinks he knows. It's like every other time he's lost a handful of seconds to uncontrollable anger and found holes punched in walls, hurt friends nursing gruesome injuries, and wary weapons aimed at him by familiar people.

This whole charade is a paradise made for fools.

***

Flat on his back, right arm on his stomach, left arm splayed out, Barnes lies on top of his bed. His body feels hollow, cold, and numb, all at the same time.

Sam brings a bag of frozen, spoiled peas, wrapped in a moth-eaten linen towel, and gently folds it around the worst of the break.

"You got any other ideas?" Sam asks.

His eyes are heavy and cold. The ceiling isn't as sharp as it should be. He last slept about seven hours ago, and he's already tired. Drained. Exhausted. Plowed over. Buried.

"It'll work," Barnes mumbles, his throat dry and head pounding. "He can't focus."

"How'd you do it?"

Barnes laughs, and then really wishes he hadn't. The laugh sends fiery splinters into his newly, totally-re-broken arm, the one Sam'd re-set and re-bandaged. Because Steve had thrown a punch, and Barnes would not ever again use his left arm against him.

"I didn't have a choice. It was either do it, or end back in a fucking cell, with… bad things."

Sam sighs. "How does the whole thing go? Maybe I can help."

"You've got black and red. Breathe in for three seconds, and you've got black. Breathe out for three seconds, and you've got red. Over and over again. It's about timing."

"That's meditation."

"Fine. It's fucking meditation."

Sam laughs, the vibration moving through the mattress and straight into Barnes' arm. Barnes intentionally doesn't show the pain it causes.

"You gonna sleep?" Sam asks.

"Yep."

And he does, deep and hard, a rare, good sleep.

Sam's either too brave or too trusting, when he nudges Barnes awake with a couple of pokes to his right thigh.

That headache hasn't gone away. His arm doesn't feel any better. Actually, he feels  _worse_.

"Food?"

 _Food_.

Right arm held close to his chest, he doesn't bother putting on his jacket. His green t-shirt's good enough, and the air inside the house is on the wrong side of warm. He also doesn't bother with pants, because who the hell cares.

"You don't like pants, anymore?"

He shakes his head "no."

Sam's already got the food: half a dozen rectangular, foil containers, all sitting on the wide, square coffee table – "modern," people call it – in the living room, where Steve is sitting on the couch, seemingly contrite.

Predictably, Steve's eyes go straight to the mess that is Barnes' right arm, then to his hologrammed left arm, then to the scars on his legs. A couple new scars had joined the mix seven or eight or whatever months ago, and those are still fresh enough to stand out.

Barnes sits as far away from Steve as he can, while still being able to reach the food. He doesn't miss the way Steve swallows and tenses, silent.

Sam sits between them, grabs the TV remote, and turns the volume up. It's a show called MegaBingo, until Sam pulls out his phone, opens up Hulu, and casts  _Brooklyn Nine-Nine_ onto the TV screen.

Barnes makes a face, looks closer at the TV, and sees a new addition: a little flash drive sticking out of the side.

Whatever.

Barnes grabs a container of food and a fork and starts eating. He's starving, and he barely tastes the food. He thinks it's rice, beans, and a heaping load of shredded chicken. It doesn't taste bland, and it doesn't taste bad, and that's good enough for tonight.

" _You should have seen us, Rosa! Charles and I were amazing."_

" _I somersaulted through a window, cut the crown out of a briefcase, and replaced everything in under a minute."_

" _Yeah, I guess you helped a little. But our fake argument was super convincing, and, all of a sudden, we had to make it longer, and we did!"_

It takes a few seconds to sink in, but, when he finally hears it, Barnes smiles.

Steve coughs, almost like he's choking.

"You okay?" Sam asks.

Barnes sees Steve nod and wave him away.

It seems like an okay show, but his mind drifts away from it. His white plastic fork scrapes against the bottom of the foil pan, about at the same time his vision blurs and eyes struggle to stay open. He slides the pan into his lap, leans against the arm of the couch, and lets go into another rare, smooth sleep.

The only upside of his dreams are that he knows they're dreams.

The clean, smooth-concrete hallway lit by rows of bright, fluorescent lights isn't real. His bare feet and bare right arm aren't really cold. He spares a glance at himself, and, yeah, he really  _is_ wearing a green t-shirt and wrinkly black boxers, and he really does have his left arm concealed with Stark's hologram, but this place isn't real.

He walks down the hallway. New, steel doors dot its length on either side, and he tries to open a few of them. Their metal lever handles are cold and locked, immovable even against the crushing strength of his left hand.

The building smells new, in that it doesn't have that familiar stench of damp mildew, crumbling rock, and musty concrete. He can tell that it's  _not_ deep underground, not like so many others.

Iodoform, antiseptic, and the smell of stainless steel lingers in the air. Fresh paint mingles with those scents. So does blood.

His right arm aches and burns. Seeping, bloody gouges ring his upper arm – not real. It's not real, and so he ignores it.

He comes upon an elevator bank with shiny metal doors. The reflection is him, the way he is now. In the reflection, he's flanked by four armed, helmeted soldiers, two on each side. Although it's only a dream, his chest seizes, and his lungs forget how to work. Afraid, he forces himself to look to his side – and, fuck, they're  _there!_

_Whoosh._

Barnes spins, ready to fight, but so completely misjudges. His center of balance dissolves into aching, pounding, sweating adrenaline, and he teeters for a millisecond. It's too late.

He falls and falls, down an empty, deeply black elevator shaft. Weightlessness sucks away his stomach and breath, as he falls down, down, down, like so many times before –

Barnes jerks awake: shoulders bunched, legs tense, teeth clenched, palms clammy. His heart  _thumps-thumps-thumps_.

Something like agony thrums through his right arm, and he takes the time to notice that he's got it in a left-handed vice grip. Knowing it's going to hurt even more when he lets go, he unlocks his fingers and closes his eyes to the burst of pain.

It doesn't feel more broken, but it badly hurts.

"You good?"

Barnes opens his eyes. Sam is sitting on the chair across from the couch, a tablet in his lap. A different show is on the TV; Barnes hears the characters say something about "the Tandy man can."

"Yeah. Stupid dream." That's all it was; one of the better ones, even. "Where's Steve?"

"Went to bed about an hour ago. You've been out for four." Sam swipes at his tablet's screen. "Wanna talk about it?"

Barnes shakes his head and answers sharply. "No."

"Okay. How are you feeling?" Sam asks.

His right arm is almost literally on fire, but his headache is gone. Actually, he could eat again and wonders what might be in the kitchen. He forgets what dinner was but he remembers that it was good. Maybe some of it is left.

"…did you hear me?"

"Oh. Yeah. Not bad."

Sam looks up from his tablet, with an expression made of purpose and concern.

Preemptively, Barnes worriedly asks, "What?"

"Don't bail on—"

"Christ, I  _just_ woke up."

Sam laughs, but it doesn't sound like because he thinks this is funny. "You don't  _know_."

Barnes responds with a heavy sigh. He leans deeper into the couch, slouching like an asshole teenager, and wishes he was still asleep.

Sam persists. "Can you do this?"

"We already talked about—"

"You broke your own damned arm. And just tried to again."

"I did  _not_ " is on the tip of his tongue, but new finger-like bruises are already forming around his arm. Broken blood vessels are mottled red.

He wants to disappear inside a hooded jacket.

"You're a wreck."

Sam's honest, but he has no idea about the hot shame that roils through Barnes' body. Bucky and the Winter Soldier had at least one thing in common: neither had ever been a  _wreck_. Put the two together, and, somehow…

Maybe the worst part is that he doesn't disagree with Sam.

"It's been worse since we got here. I don't know why." Barnes wants to plop his face into his hands and rub his eyes, but his left hand fucking sucks for that, and his other one doesn't want to move right now. "This is the only way I know to help him. Maybe it was a mistake. I don't know."

Sam is quiet for a long time after that. Shame and guilt weigh heavily enough to keep Barnes planted in his seat, fake-watching the show to mask how his mind is spinning. He doesn't dare look at Sam, but he hears the sound of fingers tapping and swiping at a touch screen.

Then, finally: "Tell me about '45."

Barnes trusts Sam almost as much as anybody else, but that's not for anyone, even someone he owes quite a lot.

"The first two months of '45," Sam clarifies. "I don't need the rest."

"Why?" Barnes puts some clipped bite into the question, meant to be a gentle warning shot.

Sam bites his cheek for a second - long enough to prepare Barnes for the gut punch. "A couple years ago, he told me that you hated him in '45."

Oh. That.

"That's a strong word," Barnes says.

"Is it a wrong word?"

A flash of anger threatens Barnes' composure. He shifts his focus to the throbbing ache in his arm and to the always-present soreness in his chest and back. He thinks about those things, instead of all the ways he wants to lash out right now.

"Look, I'm not trying to jump you. I think HYDRA exploited whatever it was."

Barnes purposefully looks at the TV to avoid Sam's eyes. "It wasn't Steve. But…he was a good target for it."

"…for?"

Krausberg – something that should pale compared to everything that came after but somehow doesn't. Zola – someone who somehow threaded marionette strings through his skin and shrunk the world into a dark, claustrophobic box, years before the rest of his life rumbled away on a set of icy railroad tracks. The War – the graves, the bodies, the piles of shoes, the dead friends, the indomitable enemies, and the sniper rifle that somehow became the most familiar, sustaining part of his life, and then Steve – who somehow, somehow, fucking  _somehow_  found a way to not be that.

"He never should have been there," Barnes says. "I  _resented_  him for being there. I never  _hated_  him."

Sam seems to understand that. It's a little unexpected that he does.

"You know, he didn't change. Not a bit. Same person, ridiculous costume." Barnes tries to make it a joke, but he fails to find the right energy for it. To his own ears, he sounds bitter. " _I'd_  changed. In my head, he was the way back home. Wasn't fair to him."

Sam slowly shakes his head. "Did HYDRA know about any of that?"

Sam's a friend: unfailing, trustworthy, loyal. If he was anything less, Barnes wouldn't admit, "I told them everything."

His dinner threatens to come back up. Barnes leans back, shifts his center of gravity, and breathes deep, finding comfort.

"'Cause I bet they gave you that choice."

Barnes glares. " _Don't_."

Not that Sam seems to be the least bit intimidated by him anymore. It seems more like Sam is mentally filing that reaction away into his therapist file.

Of all things, that realization reminds Barnes of Whitney Eakley, a young kid he'd trained at Goldie's, and of the moment when they'd shared an actual conversation instead of Eakley's typical, choked one-word answers. Sam's nothing like that, but still – the memory comes.

"I'll talk to him," Sam says. "Try to find the bottom of this."

There's a joke in there somewhere.

***

11/3/16 21:15 – i killed him

11/3/16 21:16 – are you there

2/2/17 23:41 – are you there?

2/2/17 23:50 – can we talk?/

2/2/17 23:52 – i

2/3/17 05:18 – it's early but are you there?

2/3/17 05:19 – ok. have a good day ok?

2/4/17 22:32 – have a good night too

3/5/17 12:26 – it's been warm here for a few weeks.

3/5/17 12:26 – the tulips in shakespseare park are already coming up

3/5/17 12:27 – we could go?

3/5/17 14:18 – or not

3/5/17 16:22 – i guess not

4/14/17 08:39 – fuck you

4/15/17 01:56 – i'm sorry

5/2/17 20:43 – I miss you.

5/2/17 20:47 – Bucky's here. He's almost the same.

5/2/17 20:48 – You were right about a lot of things.

5/2/17 20:49 – I wish

Steve's pinkie hits "enter" by mistake. "Shit."

His fingers hover over the "t", "h", and "i" keys on his tablet. He wants to say "I wish things were different," but that's not enough. He decides on a different route:

5/2/17 20:51 – this could all be different.

5/2/17 20:53 – April 14 was a bad day after a bad day. I'm sorry I said that.

5/2/17 20:54 – It's probably good you're not here.

5/2/17 20:55 – I don't blame you for anything. Take care of yourself.

"Cap, seriously, MSN Messenger was cool when I was sixteen," Sam says. "Probably not even then."

Steve looks at Sam's socked feet, perched on the coffee table next to a can of Pepsi, and minimizes the messenger program. "It's not whatever you're talking about. It's secure."

"Suuure." Sam nods. "Any luck?"

"No. Do you know where she is?"

For months, he'd believed— _believed—_ that HYDRA had Sharon, like he'd  _believed_  that Bucky was dead. He'd learned how to spin sticky webs of lies, and that therapist had – Doesn't matter.

In being away from Stark Tower, even for this small handful of days, he's found a pocket of cool, fresh clarity. It  _finally_  feels like progress.

"Nope. Where do you think she is?" Sam asks.

Steve realizes he's talking to Sam the therapist and sighs. "SHIELD, somewhere. Getting better."

"That's a pretty good guess." Sam leans forward, elbows-on-knees, feet off the table. "You really believe that, or are you playing me?"

"Both," Steve admits, somehow finding a smile. "It's getting easier to think. I've been a real asshole to you."

Sam keeps nodding – but also smiling. "It's okay. I feel like I might've been an asshole to you, too. I wish I would've made it easier for you the last few years. He's a good guy."

That's  _not_  getting easier.

Steve looks at the grimy floor, fingers intertwined together into a mass of white knuckles. "Yeah."

"He's got better taste in music than you, too."

Steve doesn't respond. He knows Sam is trying to lighten the sudden tension, but what a way to miss the mark entirely.

Sam clears his throat and sits up straight. "I have a theory. Kind of a shitty one."

"About?"

"Why this is still happening the way it is."

Again: missing the mark. Because: what could Sam possibly know enough about this to be able to form a  _theory_. The only other person on this planet who  _knows_  is a person Steve can't bear to be near. These days, he thinks that's called a catch-22.

For the first time in a long time, Steve clamps down on a spewing rush of insults. "I can do without," he manages to say instead.

Sam exhales heavily. "Bucky thinks it's—"

"Leave it," Steve snaps angrily.

Although it's a normal anger, Sam flinches in fear, and that right there squares the last eight months.

"I'm gonna get some shut-eye."

Steve's already halfway off the couch by the time he announces it, and he's halfway across the room when Sam's relief comes through, loud and clear.

The first  _day_ he'd had the serum, he'd noticed the sounds that people's bodies made: the speed of their respirations, the wet clacking of their blinks, the crackles of their bones and creaking of their skin, their barely-there whispers, and the racing thump-thump-thumping of their hearts.

He hears the same from Sam: his shallow, quick breaths, his rapid blinks, the  _snap snap_  of his balled-up knuckles, the whispered "holy shit," and the sinking tempo of his heartbeat. It's a language that translates to ebbing adrenaline and respite.

Steve can't blame him.

In his room, Steve lays awake on top of the dusty covers.  _Not my life_  trickles through his head, an album track skipping over and over again. He knows better than to think it.

A room over, the temperate, smooth voice he yearns to hear is as reliable as a minefield.

 _Boom_.

***

The story will continue in  _Chapter 3: The Sleeping Graves_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration from Winter in the Wind by Run River North (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGqVeUjZww8)


	3. The Sleeping Graves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A story about a one-hit wonder and a pinball machine, with Sam stuck in the middle. A story about what it once meant to make it home. A story about blame, choices, how everything could have been different, time and time again - and a final handful of ticking minutes that neither of them should have had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains graphic descriptions of physical and psychological torture, major character death, and rape (unrelated to the first two).

Thanksgiving 2015. The Panthers beat the hell out of the Cowboys, and it was past midnight when Sam's sixth beer bottle  _clinked_ onto the hardwood floor. Sharon slept, curled up on a small upholstered armchair, something like drool (Steve had learned better than to either call it that or verbally acknowledge its existence) on her chin.

Sam slurred out a question. "You still all about going back over there? To Europe?"

Steve backed out of some new Roku app called Sling TV, navigated into Hulu, and mindlessly scrolled through shows and movies he'd never heard of. "Can we not?"

It wasn't said meanly, or even sharply. To his ears, he sounded tired; he truly, honestly, didn't have it in him tonight to go down this path, either arguing with Sam or wondering about Bucky.

Sam slunk down into the sofa, boneless and sloppy, his head nearly to the cushions. "They just added all the 007 movies. Don't know if you'd like them, but you've gotta watch  _GoldenEye_."

Steve sipped at a bitter IPA gone long warm, the condensation on the bottle already dry, and nodded. He couldn't find  _GoldenEye_ in the list and moved on to another category.

A sigh grumbled out of Sam's throat. "Shouldn't've said anything. Sorry, man."

Steve's eyebrows raised. "Don't worry about it. And, no, I'm not."

Even though saying that, still, after all these weeks and months, made his throat feel tight.  _He's out there:_ entirely alone, considered a criminal, and being hunted by HYDRA as much as Bucky was hunting HYDRA. In all likelihood, he was already dead, or, worse, captured.

 _I had you_.

"If you had a mirror, you could see the look on your face right now."

Even drunk, Sam was genuinely one of the most insightful people Steve had ever known. Most times, it was entirely terrible to have someone see straight through him.

Steve clicked into a random show—who cared—and leaned back. His shoulder brushed Sam's, but he didn't dare look away from the screen. "I let him fall once. Now twice."

How poetic.

Sharon called it "dramatic." Natasha thought it pathetic, without ever voicing that word. And Sam? Sam still thought Bucky was someone better off gone, for everyone involved.

"When he's ready—"

"He's not coming here," Steve interrupted, each word said sharply, eyes still on the TV. "What they made him do… He'll never forgive himself. He'll never put it behind him. He'll never show up here. Even  _if_ he's alive."

And hadn't eaten a gun, or been captured.

Fire shooting from his gut up into his chest, Steve followed up with an unfair, true statement. "You can stop acting like you care, any damn time you want."

Sam shifted his head, so that his attention was wholly on Steve. Steve locked his jaw, tight and square: this is  _exactly why_ he hadn't wanted to go down this path.

"You told me enough from that file. You think I blame him, but I don't. Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything. It's not about being strong. It's not about ego. It's not about how tough someone thinks they are. It's bad shit, Steve. I get that."

Hearing that doused a small, not insignificant part of the fire roiling inside of him.

Less than a year later, Steve's entire body was on fire. Maybe literally. He didn't know if he'd ever even know.

_Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything. It's not about being strong. It's not about ego. It's not about how tough someone thinks they are. It's bad shit, Steve._

A sharp prick stung the top of his left hand. The room was blurry. A gray figure skittered left to right, left to right, left to right. He blinked and blinked, but his vision didn't get any better. Cold numbness slithered through his body, his skin tingling, maybe like what hot oil heating on a hot pan would be like if the pan was cold and the oil was cold and that didn't make sense but it did.

One by one, the needles were plucked out of his fingers, and then the metal chains were peeled away from his wrists. The floor rushed to meet him, hard and cold. It barely hurt. It almost felt good, the way his tearing, burning shoulders didn't have to hold his weight.

Fingers curled into his hair and pulled, dragging him across the hard, cold floor. He didn't fight it. He blinked and watched the blur of gray blur past.

The fingers dropped him. He closed his eyes, thinking that he could find dark, deep relief in sleep, but sleep didn't grab him the way he'd thought it would. It ran away, like the fucking sleep cat in the stupid fucking sleeping pill commercial.

_Language._

"No sleeping."

Not Bucky. Male. Accented. Eastern European, maybe.

"You kill this person, you sleep. Five minutes to decide. Five days, if you don't. And it dies, anyway. Don't you want to sleep?"

What person?

Footsteps circled back around him, then stopped somewhere behind him.

 _Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything_.

Somehow, his brain spit out a decent thought: the person he used to be would never have thought  _what person_. It would have thought  _no fucking way_  or  _we'll see_ or  _I can do this all day_ or something tough, strong, resolute.

But, seriously: what person?

He concentrated, pushing away strings and circles of thoughts, and finally heard it: wheezing, fast breaths, muffled. Right in front of him. Close.

On his own, he lifted his head, opened his eyes, blinked and blinked and blinked, and saw a person in front of him: a black hood over their head, down on their knees, right arm behind their back, left arm – left arm silver and limp.

He shook his head, a sharp jab right, and blinked.

"What…"

It didn't make sense. Why would Bucky –

"Kill him, and it all stops. One minute. Don't you want to sleep?"

"I – What?"

Why –

He squeezed his eyes closed. Pulled his arms over his head and ignored the blistering pain. Chased the sleep cat, in circles and circles and circles, because, if he caught it, and if he could  _sleep_ , he could  _think_  and this would all  _make sense_  and he could  _fix it_.

Three gunshots:  _bang, bang, bang_.

A  _thud_  and the sick  _crack_  of a skull hitting the floor.

He opened his eyes: red blurring with gray, the black hood inches away. Footsteps  _thudded_  toward him. Fingers picked up his left hand, and there was something sticky, something uncomfortable there.

His hand flopped back to the ground, and he saw scuffed, black boots walk toward the person. The hood came off, a slow blur of black, and then blue, dull eyes. Bucky's face.

"Paint something beautiful."

_Paint something beautiful._

_Paint something beautiful_.

 _Paint something beautiful_.

Three worms burrowing into his brain:  _paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful_.

"You will not sleep, until you do. Don't you want to sleep?"

The next thing he knew, he was hung back up, and Bucky wasn't dead, and  _what the fuck what's real what's real what's real_   _if I could sleep sleep sleep sleep._

Everything Bucky did was worse than before, in unspeakable, unthinkable ways, for days and days and days.

Somewhere in the middle of it – or the beginning, or the end, or nowhere in between, he  _didn't fucking know_  – his body jerked, fingers stretching for the gun holster strapped to Bucky's thigh. There was no way to get it, but it was the instinct, the urge, the compulsion to grab that gun and  _make this end._

Bucky didn't miss it. He drew the SIG Sauer P-220 from its holster, drove a bullet into the chamber, and waved the weapon, barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

"Weiselheim. The mass grave, behind the factory. You wanna know a secret, Steve?"

It wasn't that long ago, except it was a fucking eternity ago. He remembered: puking, his friend's hand on his back, something like "we're gonna beat'em" almost making it all okay.

"I remember thinking – how could anyone become a person who could dig a hole in the ground  _that deep_  – and fill it with bodies? I thought – that if I ever became that person, that I hoped someone would kill me."

The gun waved again.

"You act like you want this gun, but Steve – you let me go. You let me fall. I've filled  _so many_  graves. Because of  _you_."

Steve squeezed his eyes closed. He might have hated the sound of Bucky's voice. He might have cried, with hot, silent tear drops spider stepping down his face.

The gunshot sizzled lightning through his head, rang bells in his ears, pushed red, red, red into his eyelids. His left leg gave out, its bare ounce of remaining strength replaced with agony.

Maybe he screamed; he didn't know.

Maybe he slept; he didn't know.

 _Sleep sleep sleep. Please sleep_   _deprivation will make a person do anything. It's not about being strong. It's not about ego. It's not about how tough someone thinks they are. It's bad shit, Steve._

Another sharp prick in the top of his left hand. The room was blurrier; a black-clothed figure skittered left to right, left to right, left to right. He blinked and blinked. He was numb: so much, so much, so much that it became nothing, nothing, nothing, and he wanted to  _sleep_.

One by one, the needles were plucked out of his fingers—he didn't know how he had fingers left—and then the cold, metal chains were peeled away from his wrists—and he didn't know how he still had skin there. The floor rushed to meet him, hard and cold and sticky and metallic.

Fingers curled into his hair and pulled, dragging him across the hard, cold concrete. He couldn't fight it.

The fingers dropped him. He closed his eyes, not expecting and not finding sleep. He wondered how long he could go – without sleep, without food, without dying. Then he remembered what he'd read in the file – how HYDRA broke people.

 _It's bad shit, Steve_.

"You kill this person, you sleep. Five minutes to decide. Five days, if you don't. And it dies, anyway. Don't you want to sleep?"

Not Bucky. Male. Accented. Eastern European. Same as before.

Footsteps circled back around him, then stopped somewhere behind him.

 _Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything_.

On his own, he lifted his head, opened his eyes, blinked and blinked and blinked, and saw another person in front of him: a black hood over their head, down on their knees, right arm behind their back, left arm – left arm silver and limp and it still  _didn't make any fucking sense_.

 _Language_.

"Kill him, and it all stops. Don't you want to sleep?"

Fingers stiff, inflamed, painful with every twitch, he dug their pads into the concrete, and pulled himself an inch or two forward, his right leg helping. His left leg wasn't helpful. Legs were supposed to be helpful.

Another inch. Another inch. Another inch. Icy sweat drowned his skin.

He could hear the person's breaths: wet, ragged wheezes. He could smell blood and burnt skin that smelled differently than his own.

Close enough, he reached up, right shoulder cracking and popping, shoots of lightning running into his hand, and pulled off the black hood.

Bucky's face. Glassy, dull blue eyes.

Fucking  _blue_.

In the sunlight, gray. Ebbets Field, in the back row, Bucky's foot pressed against the wooden chair in front of him. Steve: hunched over, a pack of peanuts crumpled in his hand.

"C'mon, I could hit better than that!" Steve would mutter under his breath, and Bucky would never correct him and say, "No, Steve, you couldn't." And Steve might've looked over at him, to make sure he wasn't laughing or rolling his eyes or  _gone_  – but he was there, always, eyes gray, until the sun disappeared and turned them brown or blue or –

Those days –

"I'd give anything, Buck. I'd give anything. It all."

_Sleep deprivation –_

Steve dropped his head, bottled strength and everything special gone, and waited. Cried into the concrete, because it wasn't about how strong he couldn't be.

Three gunshots:  _bang, bang, bang_.

Another  _thud_  and another sick  _crack_  of a skull hitting the floor.

Footsteps  _thudded_  toward him. Fingers picked up his left hand, and there was still something sticky, still something uncomfortable there.

He – he didn't know why he was crying. Something about baseball. Peanuts. A shitty hit.

Fingers curled into his hair, pulled his head up. He kept his eyes closed, until a hand slapped his face, and they opened on reflex.

Bucky's face, Bucky's eyes, all of him dead on the ground.

"Paint something beautiful."

_Paint something beautiful._

_Paint something beautiful_.

 _Paint something beautiful_.

Three worms, burrowing into his brain:  _paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful_.

"You will not sleep, until you do. Don't you want to sleep?"

The next thing he knew, he was hung back up, and Bucky wasn't dead, and  _what the fuck what's real what's real what's real_.

"'Buck. I'll make this as short as I can. I was wrong.'"

Jaw clenched, teeth aching, Steve tried like hell to ignore the sing-songed, twisted words. The ones he'd written in a letter two years ago.

He hated the sound of Bucky's voice.

"'I told you that you've known me your whole life, and that's not right.  _I've_  known  _you_ my whole life. I don't remember a time before you. I don't remember a time after you.'"

Bucky's voice stopped, but his brown eyes kept moving, left to right, stretching all the way down the letter. Steve watched expression bleed from his face.

Finally, Bucky frowned and lowered the paper. "This is sweet, Steve," a half-whisper, a deep breath. Steve's stomach somersaulted: hope. "I'm sorry it has to be this way."

"Doesn't have to be. You know that."

The only voice Steve had left was crackles and rasps. Even those thin, croaked words sparked fire in his lungs and stretched apart the dry, bleeding cracks in his lips.

He only wanted to sleep.

A blurry, silver knife twirled between Bucky's fingers. Steve blinked, wanted to rub his eyes but couldn't move his hands. Time was sluggish and moved in jilted waves.

Suddenly, Bucky was inches from him, hot breath pounding against Steve's face, and he felt the tip of the knife cut a deep line across the underside of his arm.

"You don't know how much I hated you.  _For years_. 'The Little Guy From Brooklyn Who Doesn't Know When to Back Down.' Really? How 'bout the little burden from Brooklyn, who didn't know how to do  _shit_  for himself.  _For years_."

The knife stopped at the crook of his elbow, its tip balanced against the crease.

Steve barely noticed it. He only noticed the venomous resentment in Bucky's voice and the rage that gouged lines in his face. Brown eyes – and that was wrong, wasn't it? Everything else –

"—three jobs for you. I couldn't god damn  _move_ , when I got home. And all you fucking did was  _bitch_ about your fucking paints and your fucking paper. It's all you ever did. We barely had food, but Steve wants his paper. And, no, you know what really gets me? Do you want to know, Steve?"

The world lifted up, a hot air balloon, higher and higher and higher, spinning and spinning and spinning. Those words, all of them, were –

"I barely had anything left after Krausberg, but you wanted to play war hero. That fucking guard raped me for two months straight, and you couldn't _see it_ ," Bucky snarled, somehow controlled and precise in how he spoke. "You didn't even  _notice_. That my world was  _fucking gone_ , but, it was all okay, because you got yours. You'd give it all? You  _took it all_."

Higher, and higher, and higher. Spinning, spinning, spinning.

He was cracking in half.

His eyes got blurrier, wetter; throat dryer, stickier.

"You don't feel it—do you?"

Steve heard the words, but they didn't mean anything. He felt the pain in his elbow—excruciating, the kind that meant permanent damage—but it was nothing,  _nothing_ , compared to what Bucky had said.

His heart skipped, over and over.

He felt a metal fist smash into his right cheek, heard "you fucking answer me," but the balloon hadn't crashed yet. It didn't know how to: the world had crumbled away.

"Fine. I've got alotta things you're gonna feel."

He heard the knife  _clatter_  to the floor, then the  _whir_  of a drill. Bucky's smile stretched to the corners of his eyes.

"Come back, Steve. There isn't a world without you in it."

Unspeakable things happened, until the other man came back: pricked his hand, dropped him to the floor, dragged him across the room.

He wanted to –

 _Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything_.

On his own, he lifted his head, opened his eyes, blinked and blinked and blinked, and saw a person in front of him: a black hood over their head, down on their knees, right arm behind their back, left arm – left arm silver and limp and it still, still, still  _didn't make any fucking sense_.

"Kill him, and it all stops. Don't you want to sleep?"

He dragged himself to the person, pulled off the hood, and found the same thing: Bucky's face, with glassy, dull blue eyes.

HYDRA never let Bucky die. Eight attempts, none mattered, and Steve wondered –

Then lost the thought, a wisp of smoke curling into thin air.

"'l-l-lease. S-t…'eve."

His voice. It was Bucky's  _voice_.

Steve's entire body reacted: muscles seized, tendons tensed, stomach flipped, adrenaline twisted him into knots and boiled bile that bubbled up his throat, until he heaved it out onto the floor.

" _Please_."

The voice. The fucking  _voice_. Steve pressed his head against the floor and wished he could reach into his head and  _take out that voice_.

"Don't you want to sleep?" The other voice, Eastern European.

A knife dropped to the floor and clattered by his hand. Steve's fingers wrapped around its hilt.

"P-pl-ease."

_Sleep deprivation will make a person do anything._

Steve came down hard on the ground, his right arm buckling.

He heard a  _thud_  and the sick  _crack_  of a skull hitting the floor.

Blood spider stepped across the concrete. Steve blinked and saw: the neck sliced clean open, the hilt of the knife bloody, and –

That voice gone.

Footsteps  _thudded_  toward him. Fingers picked up his left hand, and there was still, still something sticky, still, still something uncomfortable there.

"Paint something beautiful."

_Paint something beautiful._

_Paint something beautiful_.

 _Paint something beautiful_.

Three worms, burrowing into his brain:  _paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful, paint something beautiful_.

"Very good, Steven. Pleasant dreams."

The footsteps thudded away. A heavy door  _scraped_ opened and  _clanged_ shut.

He didn't have the strength to drag himself away, to find somewhere better to sleep, so he slept right there, blue eyes watching.

***

Out on the patio, Barnes squirrels in one-armed push-ups before Sam wakes up. His arm still aches, but the bones have healed well enough. The pain is muscular, superficial, nothing.

In the few days it's taken the bones to knit back together, Steve has barely said a word to him. Will barely stay in the same room.

It's okay. They'll get there, somehow.

An hour later, Barnes is still sitting in the corner of the patio, hunched over an e-book called  _Airframe,_  when he hears Steve's footsteps, then the door sliding open.

"Good morning," Barnes greets, even and neutral. He flips a page.

The silence drags on for long enough that Barnes really doesn't think Steve's going to answer.

"Morning."

He hears Steve drop into the chair, then the soft tapping of a stylus on a screen.

In the book, Casey is  _climbing_  a fucking  _plane_ , in the middle of an abandoned warehouse, while trying to evade some super elusive attackers, and he can't think of anything  _stupider_   _to do in the entire world than that_ , and he happens to say out loud "why the hell would you do that?"

"You mind?" Steve snaps.

Pissy Steve. Wonderful. Historically, Pissy Steve sucks.

"No. If you've got an issue, spit it the fuck out," Barnes says.

Silence.

Fucking  _fine_.

He keeps reading.

Steve's stylus doesn't slip across the screen. His breaths are loud and getting louder, working up into something.

"Art school."

"What about?" Barnes prods.

In his peripheral vision, he sees Steve looking at him. When he meets Steve's gaze, Steve raises both eyebrows, expectantly.

"I don't know what you're asking," Barnes bites, each word clipped. Adversarial. He doesn't have the patience for this. He's  _not_ ready for this.

Steve's eyes search Barnes' face, and he has  _no idea_ what Steve's looking for.

Fuck it.

He stands up, leaves his tablet on the ground, and brushes seasons of dirt and dust off his pants. "Are you talking about the art school that you never mentioned once, during the War? That one?"

Still adversarial. It's a raw point, when it really shouldn't be after an entire  _lifetime_ , but he remembers why it is.

Steve's expression confirms: yes, that one. The asshole snipes, "Were there two?"

If Steve's not going to  _communicate_ , then Barnes will assume the question is "why?"

_Why._

"No one was making it back. It was the only way I knew how to take care of you,  _when_  I didn't come home. Is that what you wanted to know?"

Evidently not, when Steve stands up, and, with charged, superficial neutrality, asks, "Do you remember everything?"

"I don't know."

Steve shoots him an incredulous look. Like everyone else thinks: it should  _all_ be  _easy_ , because a tiny piece of it might be.

"I don't know what I don't know," Barnes says, feeling the power of those words. They feel  _good_.

"Were you mad at me?" Steve asks, nothing in his tone.

That stops Barnes: mouth open, eyebrows crunched together, breath locked in his chest. After a too-long moment, he closes his eyes and shakes his head. When he opens his eyes after another too-long moment, he focuses on the partly-open bloom of some orange flower – nowhere near Steve.

Sam was right: HYDRA used it.

"Yeah. I was."

"Did you hate me?" Steve sounds angry again.

It takes a couple seconds for that question to register, for the words to make sense in his head, even though he knew to expect them.

He hadn't expected the anger. Hearing it from Sam wasn't a big deal. Hearing it from Steve –  _fuck that_.

"Is that what you think?" Barnes hisses, taking too many steps toward Steve, before he even knows what he's doing. It's an aggressive move.

Steve doesn't answer. Doesn't waver. Doesn't step forward or move back. Only waits, icy fury in his eyes.

"I never  _hated_  you. Christ."

He sees Steve move, recognizes the shift in his body language, and knows that Steve is going in for a right hook and a shove toward the stucco wall of the house. Even pre-war Bucky Barnes could have evaded the attack. The Winter Soldier would have caught Steve's fist with his left and crushed bone.

The person he is today, the person he decided to be to help Steve, takes the hit, pain blossoming over his right cheekbone and up through his skull. He lets Steve slam him against the wall, and he lets the back of his head smack into it.

"I don't believe anything you say," Steve jeers. "You're a god damn  _liar_."

Steve draws back for another punch, an uglier one, and Barnes doesn't fucking think so. He sees an opening: a good one.

The stucco cracks and buckles under Steve's fist. It's too late.

Barnes' arms are wrapped around Steve's torso, tight and unrelenting. He forces Steve away from the wall and says, "Yeah, but I love you anyway."

Steve's back and shoulders are tense, though his arms hang loose at his side. He's not even breathing, probably out of spite.

Barnes doesn't know if it's the right thing to do. It's the only thing he  _can_  do, as the patio and its vibrant trees and overgrown weeds and blossoming flowers spin in a centrifugal blur of green, and even as he and Steve might even be swirling in nauseating, Cyclone circles.

"I love you." Barnes' mouth goes faster than his maybe-bruised brain. "More than I knew. More than you know. More than they can take."

He sounds nothing like Bucky used to – and, now, right now, that's more than okay.

Steve breathes. His arms come up, loose and lukewarm. Barnes hears Steve whisper "black" and "red," spread three seconds apart, over and over again, his arms wrapping tighter around Barnes' body.

Which is great, because the spinning patio has little black spots all over it. The more he blinks, the more those spots grow, and the heavier his eyes become. Little bolts of lightning crackle up his forehead, splintering, splintering, splintering.

His body bleeds strength, legs weaker and weaker, until he's pretty sure that Steve is holding him up.

The patio does one more spin, and then Steve really is holding his unconscious body upright.

***

" _Sam!_ "

Steve's voice is all panic and fright. It sounds nothing like him.

Sam's tablet skitters across the coffee table and lands on the floor. He's barefoot and isn't wearing pants, but none of that matters. He runs toward the patio.

" _Sam!"_  Louder: more scared, more panicked.

He doesn't even want to know what –

It's Barnes, flat on his back, unmoving. Blood bright on the terracotta slab. Steve hovering over him, hands clenched in Barnes' gray t-shirt.

For a piece of a second, the world blows up like a hot air balloon: up, up, and away.

 _He's dead_.

Like walking into a room, minutes behind three gunshots, and finding the same body.

Barnes isn't dead: his chest rises and falls. His right leg draws up. He accidentally whacks himself in the face with his left hand, then groans.

Relieved, Sam takes the few steps to where Barnes lays.

"What happened?" Sam asks, even as he sees a bruise forming around a deep, red gash on Barnes' cheekbone. The blood is oozing from the back of his head, and, by happenstance alone, Sam glances up and sees a spot on the stucco wall: dark blood, brown hair, about six feet up on the wall.

"I hit him," Steve answers, suddenly flat. "I can't control it. I  _told you_."

Barnes' eyes don't open, but his eyebrows crash down. And he says something—something fierce—in what sounds like jumbled Russian.

"No, Buck. We God damn do."

Sam looks up at Steve, wondering but not asking.

Steve stands and backs away, hands tucked under his armpits. "I'm gonna kill him."

Barnes says something that includes "nyet" three times in a row. It's not hard to grab the meaning.

Right now, Sam doesn't care about any of that. More blood is oozing onto the ground, and Barnes' face is pale, cool, and clammy. Even speaking Russian, Sam can tell that Barnes is slurring his words. It's a head injury – and that last one, back in the cosmodrome, hadn't gone so well.

"Open your eyes," Sam instructs.

Barnes does, but only for a split second. He covers his face with his right hand. His chest freezes, jaw clenches, and his fingers dig into his forehead.

Sam squeezes his right shoulder. "Hey. Breathe."

Barnes does him one better: goes completely limp, hand sliding off his face – but he starts breathing again, at least.

Out of nowhere, the proverbial lightbulb snaps on, brighter than anything Sam's ever seen.

***

Eight months ago, deep inside the medical suite in Stark Tower, Barnes looked completely miserable: right ankle in a cast, right arm in a sling, and his abdomen probably still like jelly – on top of everything that had happened in Death Valley.

Sam rapped on the door frame, more of a courtesy than a request for permission.

"Yeah," Barnes groused without even looking Sam's way.

Sam stepped inside the room. "Just checking in."

"You don't have to be here," Barnes said, still without looking up. It was completely obvious that Barnes meant  _I don't want you here_.

"I know," Sam replied, as he made himself at home on the bottom half of the bed. He tossed a rubber-banded deck of  _Phase Ten_  cards onto Barnes' lap.

"Shuffle those," Sam said, right before remembering that Barnes' right arm was supposed to stay immobile. "Nevermind."

Sam grabbed the deck back and began to shuffle them himself. "How are you doing?"

"I want to go home."

Sam kept shuffling, but only to keep his hands busy and Barnes talking. "Where's that?"

"Not here."

"I get that," Sam said. "DC all the way, man. This place is very Tony."

Barnes kind of flinched. Sam wondered which part of his body had caused that and glimpsed at the IV stand. He couldn't make out the labels on the bags; he hoped one of them was full of something good.

"How's Steve?"

Sam tilted his head, before shaking it. He began to deal the cards. "He'll be here for a while."

Barnes sunk his head back into his pillows, eyes staring up at the white ceiling. "'Kay."

Sam hated it when Barnes said that word. "I'll pay you ten bucks, every time you want to say that but choose not to."

Barnes grabbed his pile of cards and scooted up, until his back pressed into the mound of pillows.

"Can I ask you a question?" Sam asked, barely focused on sorting his cards.

"What's the first thing we have to do?"

"Two sets of three."

"Yeah, that's not gonna fucking happen," Barnes complained, as if he actually cared about the game. He didn't. "What?"

"Why'd you run from HYDRA? You told me you trusted them." Before Barnes could dig in or freak out, Sam added, "It might help Steve."

Barnes stared the uneven mess of cards in his left hand. "Besides because a fleet of helicarriers fell flaming out of the fucking sky and you don't fail a mission as catastrophically as that?"

Sam bit back a laugh—he heard the dark humor in Barnes' tone, and he loved it—and nodded. Because yeah: besides that.

"I was end-of-life."

Caught off guard, Sam fumbled his cards.

His Compaq laptop was end-of-life. His Kodak camera was end-of-life. His five-year-old running shoes with a worn-down, flapping heel were end-of-life. Human beings weren't  _end-of-life_.

After taking a moment to collect himself, he squared his jaw. "Don't say it like that. That's not what you are."

Barnes only looked at his hand of cards. "That's what they called it. I knew. I ran. I went back. I got shot. I ran again. I didn't know what to do. Is Steve like that?"

Sam nodded, distracted. "A little."

He couldn't think of a good reason why HYDRA would classify their multi-million dollar, seven-decade investment as  _end-of-life_. "Is it because Steve found out about you, or because of something else?"

"I don't know."

"Dude."

Suddenly, Barnes' eyes were staring into Sam's, and the only word Sam could think of to describe the expression was "desperate."

"Let it—"

"Excuse me."

Sam looked behind his shoulder at the same person who'd drawn Barnes' attention: Dr. Eicher. She stood in the doorway, with an empty syringe and a small glass bottle in her hand.

"Your last D-dimer came back elevated. I'm worried you're going to throw a clot." Eicher raised and wiggled the glass bottle. "Can I come in?"

Eicher was firm but incredibly aware, on very short notice, of how to avoid Barnes' pain points. Sam admired it, as much as he could while his head still spun around  _why end-of-life_ , agitating like his parents' ancient washer that would rock itself around the utility room.

Barnes gave her a nod and a "yeah."

She came in and went straight to his right side. She showed him the bottle, and he took the time to look at it.

"This is Heparin. It's an anti-coagulant. I'd like to start you on a high dose; we may have to titrate it up and take more blood draws. We'll also have to watch for kidney function, as well as thrombocytopenia, which is a form of bleeding. What do you think?"

She kept the syringe at her side, her hand perfectly still. Sam believed that if Barnes said "no," she wouldn't argue for a "yes." He wondered if Natasha had said something.

Like clockwork: "And if I don't?"

"You could develop a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, which is a blood clot that travels to a lung. In average humans, those are often lethal. In you, I don't know. I'd like not to find out."

Sam didn't think that's what Barnes had meant.

"Fine, do it."

"Okay," Eicher said. "I'll need your right hand."

As he extended his right hand toward Eicher, Barnes looked to Sam. "Can you go?"

He didn't want to go. He wanted to finish their discussion. He wanted answers. Instead, he scooped up the cards, said "I'll see you around," and walked into the hallway. He turned the corner and stopped.

_End-of-life._

"How's the IV? Does it sting?"

"No."

"Any trouble breathing?"

_End-of-life._

"No."

"Can I examine your abdomen?"

"Sure. Sam, you're still standing there."

 _End-of-life_.

Sam moved his feet, one step after another, on auto-pilot as he walked down the hallway, that one thought still agitating:  _Why._

_***_

The end-of-life, one-hit wonder has been in and out of it for three hours. Threw up twice. Either won't or can't speak English – and it's only  _a little_  creepy that Russian is still his default.

Right now, for now, he's lying on his side, Sam's cell phone against his ear, Natasha on the other end, using her Russian to… _do something_. All Sam can hear is her tinny, unfocused voice, and Barnes' slurred mumbling. His eyes are damn near all the way black, pupils blown wide.

Sam sits on the floor, Barnes in eyeshot, and listens, watches. He hears "nyet, ni nada," "da nyet," "ya ponimaju," and "Nat" a lot. Then strings of Russian, none of which Sam catches. Finally, maybe "packer," right before Barnes holds the phone out toward Sam and says something like "here's a glove box."

Sam stands up, takes the phone, and sits on the edge of the bed, Barnes' knee pressed into the small of his back. "Hey, Nat."

"He's slurring but coherent. Watch for the basics, but he sounds…not horrible." A long pause. "It's your call."

Not what he wanted to hear. "How's it going on your end?"

"We've found issues."

Sufficiently vague. Sam's learned that probably means one thing: she doesn't think the call is secure. That means that Steve is safer here than there, until he's at least somewhat back to baseline.

Sam looks to Barnes. Right before Sam's eyes, a dark purple bruise has spread across Barnes' right cheekbone, his right eye mottled purple.

He gives voice to an awful thought: "I don't want to have to choose between them."

Barnes mumbles something Sam doesn't understand and then "Steve." Sam knows him well enough to know he'd said,  _You choose Steve_.

Natasha's final word on this issue is, "Trust Barnes and get to thirty. Gotta go. And Sam – thanks."

The call ends.

Sam sighs, feeling like he's been left out to dry. He sighs again, breathes "fuck," and braces his elbows on his knees.

Ants scramble in and out of a hoard of Pepsi cans on the floor.

_Fucking Barnes._

After a long moment, Sam sighs one last time. "He's going to kill you."

Barnes says something in Russian. Once again, Sam doesn't need to know the language to know what he's saying.

On the tip of Sam's tongue is  _your brain can't take hits like this, and you fucking know it_.

Sam looks at Barnes again, sees his eyes close and stay closed, as quick as that. Dread twists around his stomach, but his only option is to press on and  _fix this_  – whatever part of it that can still be fixed, at least.

Sam slides off the bed, grabs the melted bag of once-frozen cauliflower, walks to the kitchen, tosses the cauliflower back in the freezer, pulls out a bag each of frozen carrots and noodles, wraps them both in kitchen towels, walks all the way back to Barnes' room, and sets one bag on Barnes' right arm and the other on his busted face.

Barnes whines a word that sounds a lot like "stop."

"Keep those on."

He's not going to, but at least Sam can say that he tried.

***

 _Knock, knock_.

"Steve. Steve, man, I'm coming in."

It's about a two second warning. The door opens, and Sam steps through, closing it behind him. Sam leans against the door, arms crossed.

On his bed, Steve sits up, fragmented thoughts turning to half-formed words that lodge in his throat.

"B's doing okay. Sleeping."

Steve nods. The relief he feels is only that Bucky is alive; otherwise, the dread and terror of this entire situation blankets him, tighter and heavier.

"You know he doesn't blame you."

Steve could laugh at that, and so he does. To his own ears, he sounds fucking nuts, but, beyond that, all he can think of is what Zola had said:  _your whole life, a zero-sum_.

"Is that funny?" Sam asks.

Steve shakes his head, still silent. There's nothing to say and nowhere left to take this.

"Are we not talking?"

Steve sighs. "What do you want me to say to you?"

"Where's your head?"

Steve laughs again. " _That's_  a  _gr-ea-t_  question!"

Sam hangs his head, not a trace of humor on his face. "Steve."

There's nothing to say, except for the vomit of words that storm out of his mouth: "You think we're gonna hug this out and go home? You think there's a future here? Because there's not, I can tell you that much."

"You chased  _his_  ass around Europe, thinking you could hug it out and go home. Don't give me that shit."

Given that Sam was there for all of Europe, Steve has no idea how Sam's perception of that trip can be so skewed the wrong way. Europe hadn't been about hugging it out: it'd been about saving whatever part of Bucky was left to save, even if it meant putting him down.

Maybe that's what they should be doing for him.

"Help me understand what's going on with you."

What's going on: there are  _minutes_ , where he's able to think clearly and focus. Have a conversation. Ask questions. Learn the person that Bucky's become: see the warm similarities, note the stark differences, and relax into a world where his  _brother_  is alive and  _here_. Once those minutes have ticked away – he's back in that room, that voice ricocheting inside his head, his entire world reduced to a jagged splinter, and the  _only thing_  that can make it better is –

 _Kill him_.

A gun to the face. A broken arm. A split-open skull. Lucky it's not been worse – like it'd been eight months ago.

"I can't control it. How many times do I have to god damn say it?"

Sam remains as patient and calm as ever. For a moment, Steve regrets his attitude – but then he remembers that Bucky's in the other room with his head cracked open.

"Bucky can help you in a way that no one else can. Is that something you can let him do, or is that too much?"

Sam isn't being judgmental; he's asking a real, honest question. The real, honest truth is that Steve thinks it's too much.

Steve hunches over, elbows on his knees, and buries his palms into his eyes until he sees colorful spots and flashes of light. He doesn't know why he does it – if it's because he can't look Sam in the eye, or if it's because he doesn't want Sam to see him.

"They made it so that I killed him when I heard his voice. I can't stand his voice."

Sam sucks in a breath. The mattress's springs  _creak_  and dip, and Steve can feel Sam's body sit next to his.

"We didn't know that.  _Steve_. Man. That's dangerous."

"I know. I know. I shouldn't have let him do this. I—" Had known it was selfish. Known it wasn't right. Let Bucky do this anyway. Because. "What happens to him after this?"

He can't see Sam's face to know why he doesn't answer right away. It's tempting to look up, but he doesn't.

"I don't know. Maybe he sticks around."

Those words one year ago would have jolted the world back onto its axis. They don't.

He takes a huge breath, clears his sinuses, steadies himself, and pulls his hands away from his face. He looks over, blinking away spots until Sam comes into focus, and pretends to be Captain America, one last time. "He needs that more than I need him. Get him out of here and go home."

Sam blinks a lot of times in a row. His face asks Steve if he could be any more of an idiot. "You just let me know when you're done playing hero."

That hits a nerve made raw by HYDRA. He keeps that to himself. "Sam. Please."

Sam nods, a novel written into his expression. "Once, you told me that you thought he hated you. Sounded like you two weren't really on that great of terms back in '45."

He remembers saying something like that, on the flight back to DC in 2015 – but he's not tracking what Sam's saying. "What?"

Sam lifts a shoulder. "I'm just sayin' – if that's what you thought, there's something behind it. And the most you've seen of him since then is right here."

Ice cubes might as well be sliding down his back. His shoulders tense. His neck bristles. Goosebumps prickle his arms.

"I don't know HYDRA. I know  _you_. And there is nothing in this world, that would have made you do that in Death Valley or all this here – except for him. Did they use that?"

That's a lot to unpack. A lot to think about.

Sam stands up, like he's noticed that all Steve wants is to be left alone to sift through that avalanche of shit.

"Think about it. I'm gonna be with Barnes. Don't be shy, man. And: don't you fucking leave, because I guarantee you that he'll find you in ten seconds flat. He's scary that way."

Right. Steve doesn't plan on coming back out of this room anytime soon.

The clock says it's hours later, when another  _pound, pound_ ,  _pound_  comes from the door.

Steve looks over toward it. "What."

A piece of white paper shoots under the door crack. It flits a couple inches into the room.

Perplexed, Steve rolls off the bed, picks up the paper, and reads it:  _"Hey."_  It looks like Bucky's handwriting.

Wood  _creaks_ , and the door bends inward. Steve can visualize Bucky sitting with his back pressed against it.

A pen skitters underneath the door. Steve stops it with his bare foot and picks it up.

Of course Sam told Bucky.

After a couple long sighs, Steve sits on the floor and shoots the pen and paper back under.

"I'm sorry," Steve says out loud.

He waits.

The paper comes back through. Steve knows what it's going to say before he reads it.

" _Don't be. I'm fine. Are you okay?"_

Bingo.

For years, Steve wished Bucky had been here – yearned for that connection, that shoulder, that safe place to bleed. Bucky's less than two inches away, and it's not so easy anymore – to bleed on people.

"I don't know how to fight this," Steve grinds out. It's a hard thing to admit.

" _Maybe"_  – Bucky's letters are scratchy, uneven – " _you should stop fighting it_."

"Not an option. You know that."

He waits again.

And keeps waiting.

He scratches the skin of his thumb until the top layer peels away.

He thinks about opening the door and having a real conversation – and then thinks about Bucky going limp in his arms, blood dripping onto the patio tile.

The paper comes back.

" _Sometimes it means accepting that you can't go back and finding a way to move forward. You know how to do that. You've done it."_

Steve laughs out loud. Bucky couldn't have it more wrong.

"I didn't move forward, Buck. Before you…" He shakes his head, remembering. "It was only you."

Bucky's response takes far longer than the others. In fact, it doesn't come at all.

An inexplicable burst of panic scrambles Steve to his feet. He yanks open the door.

Already, Bucky is a blur of black fabric, the writing paper flat on the ground. Bucky springs down the short hallway toward the door of his room, but his blue socks slip on the tile floor, and Steve watches him go down hard onto his left thigh.

It's enough to give Steve time to gain ground, but Bucky is a hair faster, just out of Steve's outstretched hand – sliding into his room, slamming the door shut, and keeping it closed.

Steve only pulls hard enough on the knob to  _not_  tear the door off the hinges.

"Bucky! Damn it!" He shouts, slapping his open palm against the wood of the door. "You—"

A loud  _slap_ comes back his way.

"Ah-hem."

Steve freezes. Sam's standing at the end of the hallway, arms crossed, a done-with-you expression on his face.

"I am not the babysitter here."

A snort comes from behind the door.

"And I heard that!"

Steve appreciates the concern, truly. "We're good, Sam."

Though he appears skeptical, Sam slowly steps away, backwards.

Steve sits cross-legged on the floor. "Before Insight, I went back to Brooklyn, to our apartment. It's still there, somehow. The owner actually let me in, even. Back in 2011, some historical organization tried to buy it, turn it into a museum." Steve laughs:  _everything_  of theirs got turned into a museum. "The guy'd just remodeled the whole place – new floors, new walls, new kitchen. All ritzy."

Steve leaves it at that, suddenly realizing that the paper's down the hall – and Bucky won't talk. This is as good as having real fake conversations with Bucky, his imaginary friend before Insight.

For no reason at all, that same feeling from that day in April 2014 – catastrophic, world-dropping  _numbness_  – tangles up inside his chest.  _You're alive; you're..._

Captain America's eyes don't sting with threatened tears; Steve Rogers' might.

In his back pocket, his cell phone vibrates. He pulls it out and finds an unknown number has texted him:  _"Good. That place was fucking ugly."_

Steve swipes the back of his hand across his nose, clenches his jaw, and gets a grip."Says the man who hasn't seen the neon yellow walls."

" _Do you still have trouble looking at your older artwork?"_

"Yeah," Steve answers. He hates seeing the imperfections, the mistakes, and the lack of detail, focus, and skill. It's embarrassing.

" _It's like that. I haven't gone back."_

"Buck, you're not—"

Steve stops himself right there. Sam's right: this is the most they've been near each other since 1945, and even now, Steve's barely seen enough of Bucky to know what he's like or to see what's left.

"We've both changed." It's truer than it should be, and so's what he says next. "I think I wouldn't be able to stand the person I was in the War. And especially before."

Steve backs out of the message screen and dreads— _dreads_ —the response. The screen turns black. His hand tightens around the thin metal, until it begins to creak and bend. He could crush the insides, smash the screen, and never see Bucky's response. It wouldn't matter, though; he already knows what it's going to be.

The phone buzzes. A tangled pit of nerves bounces between the walls of his stomach, but Steve puts his thumb on the "home" button and pushes, then taps into the messages screen. He focuses his eyes on the black text.

" _I loved who we were back then. I'd give anything to have those days back."_

Steve reads the words, over and over and over again, filtering them against another voice. A different voice.

Suddenly numb, suddenly done, Steve gets to his feet and walks out to the patio. The sun beats its south-equator heat against his skin and his scars, warming a deep, implacable cold.

***

At 0814 in the morning, Barnes wanders into the kitchen, his nose leading him straight to bags of local-café breakfast bagels and coffee.

Sam doesn't comment that Barnes had spent  _an hour_ in the shower and used all of the hot water this morning.  _All of it_. Likewise, Sam doesn't comment that Barnes' hair looks real fucking amazing – short, clean, hair-cream-styled.

Silently, Sam watches him, having had plenty of time to stew, think, process, and conclude. He doesn't waste any time. "Your brain can't take hits like that, and you fucking know it."

Barnes picks up a tall cup of coffee and a bag of food, then sits directly across from Sam at the small round table.

"Good morning," Barnes quips. Between sips of coffee, he follows-up with a carefree, "Yep."

Sam can't be neutral about this. He can't be cool about it. He can't be whatever the hell Barnes is being right now. "It's not funny."

Insufferably, Barnes shrugs.

To burn off energy, Sam stands up and walks to the counter. Those four steps don't really help. "How long have you known?"

Barnes slathers cream cheese on a bagel, then licks the knife. "No jam?"

" _B_."

Barnes tosses the plastic knife onto the table and looks Sam straight. "HYDRA knew before Insight."

Not an answer. Also: no shit. Sam already knew that. He lets it go. "When were you going to tell someone?"

The bagel hits the tabletop, face up, uneaten. Barnes leans back, arms crossed.

Barnes pauses for a long time, but Sam can tell he's wrestling with something else. Something to say. Sam waits, ass pressed into the edge of the counter, arms crossed tight across his chest. His knee twinges.

"After Insight, they didn't try to come after me. They didn't think I was gonna live. Who is it you think I should tell that to?"

Barnes' ability to draw accurate conclusions from thin air is, typically, incredible. Right now, it's infuriating, because there's  _nothing_ to support that – but Sam knows not to touch it. Barnes believes what he believes.

"I didn't think I'd care. But I do. I—" Barnes catches himself with a frown. "I don't want to die that way."

The suicidal person who'd once relinquished to Sam a handgun and three knives might not have cared. Telling, how that same person dragged himself back to life three days later. Barnes doesn't want to die at all.

Sam takes a deep breath and plunges into a world he wants nothing— _nothing_ —to do with. He knows what HYDRA did to Barnes, and, specifically, how they controlled the flow of his memories.

"Maybe it's not that they couldn't fix it. They couldn't sustain it. That doesn't mean that  _we_  can't fix it."

Barnes closes his eyes momentarily, opens them, and pins Sam with a pointed stare. "One hit."

"A hit you didn't defend against, from someone as strong as you. Anyone would have gone down."

Barnes nods, infinitesimal, not buying one pile of the shit Sam's shoveling. "Don't tell Steve. Please?"

That's twice now. Briefly, Sam thinks about the benefits of telling Steve – and, genuinely, can think of none. Steve can't control the black-outs, not yet; meanwhile, knowing this little bit of trivia would devastate what's left of him.

Sam nods agreement.

***

Barnes pushes out the screen of his bedroom window and crawls through the opening. A Sam-like voice in his head admonishes,  _Use the fucking front door, man._

He doesn't want Steve or Sam asking and doesn't want either of them coming. No front door.

Phone in hand, he drops into soft, sand-strewn grass and gets distance from the house. Winding through back alleys, between rows of colorful houses, and past strip malls of random businesses, he purposefully ends up in a small, grassy park near the city's center.

It's 1430, nearing the hottest part of the day. There aren't many people out here. Nevertheless, he identifies an out-of-the-way tree, slips behind it, and sits on the hard, silty ground.

Humidity settles heavily. Moisture saturates the air from the low-hanging clouds that meander through the gray, overcast sky. Even without the beating rays of the sun, it's too hot, and sweat bubbles out of his skin. He hopes it rains soon.

He calls Natasha and wills it to ring through.

_Ring._

_Ring._

_Ring._

A beat of static-laced silence.

"Hey. How are you?"

The sound of her voice evaporates the heat and incinerates the humidity. It calms a jittery, restless energy he hadn't realized was coursing through him until now.

"Not as bad as Sam thinks."

His arm's healed, he hasn't tried to break it in the last two weeks, and the oddball dreams have evened out into the usual nightmares about Insight, the cosmodrome, and faces of people long murdered. All back to normal.

"And you?" he asks.

A question she avoids answering, tone turning to business-only. He  _hates it_  when she does that. "You have ten days left. Is it manageable?"

That's a good question without a lot of great answers.

"He can control it, unless I talk," Barnes replies. "We had a great conversation over text message yesterday."

That should tell her everything she's looking to know. It might get better, after the therapist's—Russell's—influence wears out of Steve's system. Even once that happens, everyone involved knows there'll never be a return to Steve's normal.

The person who came to Kraków is gone.

That infinite chance is gone.

_We're not friends. Is that clear enough for you?_

"I'm sorry, James."

He doesn't want her apologies, or her pity. It's about Steve, not him.

"Otherwise, Sam says he's lucid. Paranoia's gone. Volatility's better."

That's almost verbatim Sam's assessment, along with, "The Hotwheels track is getting longer."

"That's good improvement," Natasha says. Her tone tells him she even means it. "It's wearing off."

He's happy about that. Steve has a future and a chance to finally rebuild his life, with better people around him than Steve might realize. In ten days, Steve will go home to them, and, with an ounce of luck, they won't let another one of HYDRA's super-secret double agents fuck with his head again.

Over the phone, he hears her take in a breath. "How are you really?"

He wishes she was here. In his head, the team is Sam and Natasha, like in Europe last year. Sam's incredible, but the brains of the team is in New York.

She's more than that. Has been for a while.

He wants her to touch him: his arm, his back, his hair. Her touch brings him down, always. And: he can't exactly ask Sam to pet his head. Steve would do it for five seconds, lose his mind, and punch him, so.

He wants to touch her: trace the scars, avoid the bad ones, write promises, remind them both that they're human and free to have this, whether they deserve it or not.

He sums that all up into one half-lie: "Good."

"Okay. We have another assignment for you, when you come back. It's optional. We can talk."

He's almost mad that she's assuming, that she's saying it like it's a foregone conclusion, when he thinks of his first question, a bad one, to Hill:  _Am I still SHIELD?_

_Get off the fence. You're SHIELD or you're not._

That's what the assignment is: time to choose. No more freelancing.

His silence unnerves her. She prods, "Think about it?"

He actually might. "Any tips for this one now? With Steve?"

It's her turn to be silent for many long, stretching moments. But she comes back to the conversation with actionable advice. "You don't sound like you, when you speak other languages. Avoid Russian – your accent's bad. Try French. German, maybe. At least you'll know."

She can't see him smile. HYDRA'd stopped trying for that accent after a while: wasn't happening.

He senses an urgency in her voice that tells him the call is nearly over. A tickle of adrenaline surges and apparently tells his brain and throat to blurt out, "I miss you."

It provides her the perfect opportunity for getting in the last word. "In ten days, come home then. Gotta go."

The call ends, the screen going black. Barnes holds onto the phone with both hands, elbows propped up on bent knees, and tilts his head toward the gray sky.

_Home._

Tempting, but something that won't mean much, can't be much if the sound of his voice devastates Steve. He'd never do that to him.

Time to find out.

***

Bucky strides through the living room, a black hoodie in his left hand. At the door, he stops, meets Steve's eyes, and gestures at the door.

Steve shakes his head "no," but Bucky doesn't move. He gestures again.

With a sigh, Steve asks, "What're you doin'?"

He earns an index finger pointed at him, then at Bucky himself, and then at the door, each motion punctuated with Bucky mouthing "you," "me," and "let's go," respectively.

Steve's not going to win this. At least he's dressed halfway decently.

Outside, Bucky intentionally matches Steve's pace, putting them walking side-by-side. Bucky points east, toward the city center with its high rises and sounds of bustling people; that's as good as any other place.

For long awkward minutes, it's only their shoes scuffling across the sidewalk. Silence is terrible when it's the only choice.

"This is stupid," Steve comments.

Hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, Bucky shrugs, as blasé as ever.

"Maybe we should learn sign language," Steve bites, being a real pill and knowing it. "Doesn't that sound like berries to you?"

He gets a smile, popped-up eyebrows, and a customary head shake, at least. He can all but hear Bucky say,  _no one talks like that anymore_.

They round a corner into an upscale commercial district. Shiny storefronts and restaurants mix with shinier windows of stout skyscrapers and hotels, concrete and metal tempered by strategically placed and manicured trees, giant flower pots, and rectangles of green grass.

He follows Bucky's lead, no idea where he's going or why. Maybe they're going nowhere, the whole point to finally get out of the house and rejoin the world.

Steve scans throngs of people moving about the street and sidewalks. Specifically, he's looking for SHIELD agents, his ever-present shadows. Everyone back home calls it  _protection –_  and he hasn't had the guts to ask  _for who?_

Truthfully, he hasn't had a need to ask that. He knows. He knows what it's like to not trust himself, to not want help, to not want pitiful stares, to not want to be dissected by psychologists, friends, and governmental oversight alike.

Steve chuffs out a laugh. "I get how hard it is to do this. Why you flipped out in Poland."

_We're not friends; is that clear enough for you?_

Bucky tilts his head back and groans. " _Je ne peux pas continuer._ "

Steve almost checks to see who said it to them. Of course, Bucky had, but his French is higher pitched than his English, and his entire way of speaking changes. Dernier would be proud.

It's brilliant.

" _Bon, qu'en penses-tu?_ " Bucky asks, then continues in French, "Natasha's idea."

A smile pulls at Steve's lips. "I think Sam's going to be real damn lost."

Steve watches Bucky return the smile. Like the other night during dinner, it comes nowhere close to his eyes, not anything like how the other one had put so much sick mirth into his.

In French, Bucky says, "It's harder than anyone seems to understand. Even Nat. Poland doesn't feel that far away."

Which begs the question. "What are you going to do after this?"

Bucky shrugs, added to by a shake of his head. " _Je ne sais pas_. Sometimes SHIELD…seems doable. In a real way." Bucky glances at his right arm. "Most times, not."

"You could stay." It's an offer, request, and demand, all wrapped into one hasty statement.

Gently, Bucky replies, still in French, "There's that easy thing again."

"We could go." For a second, Steve convinces himself that idea isn't ridiculous. "Forget I said that."

Steve is aware that Bucky is silently looking at him: appraising eyes, locked jaw, unknown thoughts sifting through all of Steve's possible fates. The eyes are different – blue, not brown – and Steve knows that Bucky wasn't the person in Death Valley – but the face is the same. That look is the same. The voice is the same.

Steve stops walking.

The fear is the same.

" _Qu'est-ce que c'est?_ "

His lungs seize, still. Inside that stillness, his heart palpitates, fast and hard. He hears the  _whir_ of a drill; the  _clink-clink-clink_  of a new bit being inserted; and the grinding  _click-click-click_  as it locked into place.

A butterfly bit, the same kind he'd used to make a cord hole for his home office desk. The one that had thrown wood shavings and sawdust all over the room.

 _Don't, don't, don't – please don't,_ begged through cotton in his throat, his brain spitting out pleas because the panic it was throwing to every bit of his body wasn't going to change a damn thing –met with appraising eyes, a locked jaw, and unknown thoughts sifting through all of Steve's fates. And then a smile, stretched all the way to his eyes, and –

The face belongs to a stranger. That smile never existed.

_Honk! Honk! Honk!_

Across the street, a yellow and orange Shell station sticks out of the side of a round, white parking garage. It reminds him of the City.

Bicyclists stream across a crosswalk made of painted white bars.

Steve finds himself sitting on a concrete garden planter enveloped by neat green shrubs. He tilts his head back and stretches his eyes up a towering building made of tan limestone and gleaming windows.

" _Está tudo fixe. Obrigado._ "

" _Tem certeza disso?_ "

" _Sim, tenho._ "

Bucky shoos a passerby away but looks uneasy and even stressed. He doubletakes at Steve – and then seems supremely relieved.

" _Hé là._  Ready to head back?" Bucky asks, slipping from Portuguese to French like it's nothing.

They've only been walking for 30, maybe 45 minutes. It can't be time to go back, only…

Steve knows he'd blacked out. Everyone calls it symptoms of PTSD, and everyone except Sam makes a big deal of it.

He must have taken too long to say anything.

"My first time was during the War. By myself, out by Soldau. I had no idea what it was." Although Bucky doesn't smile, he ends with an impossibly lighthearted, "Hasn't gotten better since."

That's Bucky. During the worst of the Depression, the worst of the War, that was all Bucky – calm, honest, optimistic realism. It was only years ago – a hand's stretch away – so close.

Right here.

A friend's face. A brother's words.

"You're alive," Steve realizes out loud.

It catches Bucky off guard. His expression melts into furrowed eyebrows and a half-open mouth, almost comically. Something clicks, and he reclaims his composure. "Yeah, I am. Let's go home. Storm's coming."

Bucky gestures up at the dark gray sky. Bundles of low storm clouds inch their way across, while thunder rumbles in the far distance. A fat raindrop taps Steve on the shoulder.

"Left arm, y'know? Glad you came back when you did."

Steve doesn't ask how long he'd been "out," because he's still sort of stuck on  _home_. Although Bucky doesn't mean New York, the world jolts closer to its axis.

***

Steve rubs the back of his hand against his forehead, bare feet slapping against the floor on the way to the kitchen. He yawns wide, while his stomach grumbles, and he thinks of coffee and—

Standing at the stove, Bucky has a red spatula in one hand and the handle of a pan in the other. "Sunny side up still, right?"

Steve knows he's gaping, but he can't move his thoughts away from the early 1940's, when Bucky would cook breakfast on his mornings off. Eggs were hard to come by, and he'd always take painstaking care to avoid breaking the yolks. No re-dos, you know.

"English, dude.  _English_ ," Sam groans, but more to break the awkward silence than to legitimately complain, Steve suspects.

" _Désolé, je ne peux pas_ ," Bucky replies, coupled with an easy, shit-eating shrug.

"Grey Poupon to you too."

Sam's dumb comment spurs a genuine, throaty laugh from Bucky. Right hand up to his face, Bucky turns toward the stove to hide the reaction but not before he lets loose an incidental snort.

"Nice."

The last Steve had known, Sam had wanted nothing to do with Bucky and was more than happy to have permanently left him behind in Poland. A few short months later, it's clear that they've created an easy, comfortable friendship. The world unquestionably moved on without Steve, but Steve can't say he doesn't love where it's stopped, in this small, homely moment.

"It sounds great, Buck," Steve finally replies.

Bucky raises a left-handed thumbs-up.

Steve sits next to Sam. He's reading a real newspaper, the pages folded into a small rectangle. A while ago, Sam had mentioned that his dad used to read the paper every morning, taking more time to fold the pages than he ever took to actually read the stories.

"Where'd you find one in English?" Steve asks.

"Supermarket down the road. It's huge, has everything."

He and Bucky had probably passed it yesterday. He hadn't noticed.

Steve relaxes into the wood chair, sprawling his legs and stretching out the muscles in his back.

Sam is truly engrossed in the paper, while Bucky quietly hums a made-up melody, like Bucky's mom used to.

Oil spits and crackles. Food sizzles. The spatula scrapes across the metal skin of the pan.

Steve sneaks a glance at Bucky. A piece of crispy toast hangs out of his mouth, and Steve swears he's bouncing. It wasn't until Steve lived with him that Steve understood cooking hadn't been about Bucky pissing off his dad. Bucky honestly loved to cook.

Still does, by the looks of it.

Bucky scoots the handle of the pan away from the edge of the stove. Always has, since the day Becca'd clipped the edge of a spaghetti pot and spilled the whole vessel of boiling water onto his left arm.

It feels like home. Smells like home. Sounds like home. Looks like home. And it'll taste like home.

A swell of emotions overcomes him, as Bucky slides two mammoth plates of wobbly sunny side up eggs and browned toast onto the table. Another equally-sized plate stacked with bacon comes next.

"How much did you make?!" Sam loudly asks.

"All of it," Bucky answers, another piece of toast in his mouth. "You eat like I do, right?"

Verklempt, Steve doesn't have an answer. Sam doesn't know French and can't bail him out, and so Steve settles for nodding.

Sam notices. "You okay?"

Steve keeps nodding. Tears prickle his eyes, but he won't cry here. He doesn't bleed like that – never for anyone to see. Or so he likes to believe.

Bucky's hand squeezes Steve's shoulder. It shatters his resolve, and the first tears roll down his cheeks.

" _Regardez_ , Sam: jam." Bucky pulls his brows together and frowns. "Sounded better in my head."

Sam crunches through a piece of toast. "I got the jam thing. Whatever the hell else you said – fuck off."

" _C'est quoi ce bordel!_  Also: can you pet my hair?"

Sam keeps eating, and it's almost funny that he has no idea what Bucky is saying. (Steve's not even sure if  _he'd_  heard that last part right.) "Nope, no idea."

Almost funny. Mostly not.

Steve wipes his face with his hands and pulls himself together. "English, Buck."

" _Bah non, ça va_ ," Bucky replies, concern clear on his face. "It's fine."

Steve focuses on pulling food onto his empty plate: eggs and toast, then half the bacon, because Bucky'll cook it but not eat it. Meanwhile, Steve avoids eye contact, if only because he knows his are red. "I mean it. Stop."

Steve pushes an egg onto a piece of toast and then bites straight into it. The bread tastes grainy and distinctly not American, but the egg tastes familiar – more pepper than salt, just enough real butter, cooked just this side of runny. It does taste like home.

Bucky's alive, and HYDRA doesn't have either of them anymore. They're both somehow more than what HYDRA tried to make them.

More tears run down his cheeks, and he wipes them away. His face burns red. His throat constricts, and the insides of his chest reconfigure into a jumbled, emotional frenzy of grief, relief, and  _anger_.

It never had to be this way.

"Mahlzeit!" Bucky declares with a lift of his coffee cup. He pointedly ignores an incredulous stare from Sam.

"You're a fucking show-off."

Sam and Bucky exchange verbal volleys—in English—laced with increasingly foul language and something about Rachael Ray that makes Bucky throw a piece of bread at Sam. It's a ruse to keep the attention off of Steve.

It never had to be this way, for either of them.

Hearing Bucky in English doesn't do anything. Doesn't trigger anything. Maybe it's the tone, or maybe it's something Steve hasn't even figured out yet.

"How many languages do you know?" Sam wonders.

Back in the day, Bucky had picked up conversational French from Dernier, and, from his mom, the entirety of Romanian.

Bucky thinks and eats but mostly eats. "French, German, Russian, and Polish are the best. Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish aren't bad. There's some Middle Eastern and Asian ones. Oh, yeah, English. I know English."

Sam laughs out loud. "You're in a  _real_  good mood today."

"It's a good day," Bucky replies. He looks to Steve. "When did you learn French so well?"

"Sometime between the end of the War and 2013."

The minute it's out of his mouth, Steve knows he's opened a door, and he knows Bucky is going to walk through it.

"Took you a while, huh?"

"Ha, ha," Steve deadpans. "Didn't see that coming."

Irrationally, the joke irks him. Maybe it's not even the joke.

Maybe it's the thought of Dernier and of the War, and maybe it's seeing so much of the Bucky he remembers in the person sitting at this table – acting like nothing is or should be wrong.

Maybe it's the question of  _why – why the hell didn't you tell me during the War?_

Maybe it's the memory of  _we're not friends; is that clear enough for you?_

Maybe it's the idea that it took those three months in 2016 and Steve killing Bucky for Bucky to – do this, be this, have this.  _Why did I have to…_

Maybe it's the certainty that all of this could have been different.

His fingernails dig into the skin of his palms, tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, and all he can hear is a flood of white sound. When the violent red clears from his vision, they're somehow both standing. They hadn't –

"Steve.  _Steve_." Sam.

Bucky's eyes flick from Steve's to a point behind Steve—probably Sam—and he shakes his head. His eyes return to Steve.

"Is this what you want? 'Cause I probably  _can't_  go get us another helicarrier. They won't give me one of those." Bucky makes his "oh well, don't care" face, one Steve hasn't seen for years, and backs away toward the kitchen's entryway.

It's a variation of what Steve said to Bucky in Kraków, years ago, when Bucky had drawn a knife and told Steve to go live his life.

Steve breathes, breathes, breathes red, breathes, breathes, breathes black, the turmoil that curls his body into a live wire drifting away.

His fingers—tight balls of white-knuckled fists—ache. He stretches all ten of them out.

"Have you asked?" Steve kids, and he knows he's a god damn pinball that won't do what it's supposed to do, no matter how much Bucky and Sam and everyone else shake the machine.

Bucky pauses, eyes searching Steve's face, and then he smiles, hesitantly – nowhere near his eyes. "No. I have  _not_ asked Nick Fury for a helicarrier."

Steve loses the moment, his thoughts drifting to one idea: that HYDRA has pushed them both to the point where _the helicarrier_  can be made into a joke.

"Christ," Steve breathes, and he turns away, walking blindly to the grease-splattered counter. He braces himself against it, palms pressing into the peeling formica edges.

"Hey. Hey. You did it."

Steve lets out a heavy breath like a bomb. "What."

Bucky is suddenly right next to him, leaning against the counter, arms crossed. He's crazy for getting so close so defenselessly. "You didn't do anything, like yesterday in the city. I mean, you killed the chair."

Steve turns and finds the dead chair. On the ground, the back rest is awkwardly angled and partly detached from its housing. Meanwhile, Sam is eating an oozing egg and bacon sandwich, apparently no longer paying either of them any attention.

"You've got this," Bucky states.

Dread gnaws and builds into things  _he doesn't want._  He wants this – this breakfast, this time, these people, this chance.

With a fervent shake of his head, he pushes Bucky aside and retreats to the living room. Restless and confused, that dread twists and twists into knots and tangles, so tightly he could scream until this house collapses.

"Okay." Bucky. "Let's go. What is it?"

Steve turns around and somehow finds the bottled courage to meet Bucky's eyes.

***

"Okay. Let's go. What is it?"

The upside is that Steve responds by looking at him. The downside is that Barnes doesn't think he really wants this conversation. Call it instincts.

A pit in his stomach, Barnes sits on the sofa in the living room. Steve finds the chair, where his tablet has been sitting idle for two days. Steve picks it up and powers it on, stylus pulled from its slot by habit: something to keep his hands busy.

Steve's eyes stay on the screen. "I don't want to do this."

So, there's something that Steve feels the need to do. The pit grows bigger.

"Why?"

Still no eye contact. "Because I don't."

Barnes has no idea what Steve could be on about. He rewinds the morning – a little rough, a little awkward, but with something like a breakthrough. It'd been good.

So. It's something that Steve's been stewing about, probably since 2014 – three long years.

_Great._

The pit grows to about the size of a black hole, with the sucking vortex to go along with it.

"Just say it," Barnes urges, recognizing that his insistence is more to get this off his plate than to assuage Steve.

"Oh, sure, I'll clean up! No problem!" Sam's voice carries from the kitchen.

Automatically, Barnes twists in his seat and shouts back, "I cooked!"

"Whatever!"

When Barnes twists back around, Steve is looking directly at him. It's an intense stare. Barnes waits a moment – not quite afraid, but nowhere near comfortable.

There's something different in the air. Something off enough to rattle his instincts.

"Turn the hologram off?" Steve asks.

Barnes can't help the concerned, questioning expression that overtakes his face. It's a really weird request.

 _Something_  flashes across Steve's face. "C'mon. You don't like it, anyway."

He sounds like himself.

Fine.

The digital skin melts away into slotted, silver metal. A restless buzz inside of him quiets. No matter what it is or where he'd gotten it, it's still his arm, and it's literally saved his life more times than he can remember. It's not that he likes it – but: it's his fucking arm.

"I like the hologram fine. It's a strategic advantage."

Steve gives a small smile and shakes his head. "Really?"

Steve  _really_ sounds like himself.

"What!" Barnes protests. "It is."

The hologram's ability to get him through metal detectors—especially the ones at airports— _alone_  makes it worth it.

Steve ignores him, gets up, walks to the sofa, and sits almost thigh-to-thigh with Barnes. To his credit, Barnes doesn't tense or shirk away. Steve's his once-was best friend and is essentially his brother. If they can't do this, then they won't make it.

Fingertips outstretched toward the arm, Steve asks, "Can I touch it?"

Barnes sidesteps his urge to point out that Steve has touched his arm plenty of times, and vice versa. Instead, he plays it off, like he's been playing shit off all morning. "Touch it? You can  _have_ it."

Steve plays. "I don't want your crazy metal arm, Buck."

Steve drags his fingertips over the metal of his upper arm, feather light at first, then harder. His fingers  _dip, dip, dip_  over the slots, further and further down, over his wrist and to the top of his hand. Barnes voluntarily turns his hand over, palm up, and lets Steve study the intricacies of the individual pieces.

"Do you feel anything?"

Barnes shakes his head: no. The arm doesn't. If it gets too cold or too hot, he might feel the induction of energy in his chest, but that's it.

Steve moves back up, higher and higher and higher, to where the star used to be.

"When did you do this?"

Referring to the black spray paint, which flakes off completely about once every three months.

The first time happened in the winter of 2015, on a particularly bad day. He stormed into the shed, looking for anything, anything, anything to get rid of the star besides an industrial metal shredder, and put his hands on a years-old can of black Krylon spray paint. He ruined a shirt and a pair of pants, but the star was  _gone_. Kind of.

It's due for another swipe of paint: the red's showing, and a faint image of the star is visible in the right sunlight.

"Winter '15."

Steve rubs his fingers over the black paint, intentionally scraping more of it off. The flakes settle on the leather of the couch.

"The star won't come off?" Steve asks.

As if it'd still be there, if it would. He lets a prickle of annoyance show in his answer of, "No, Steve, it won't."

The expression on Steve's face turns to an all-too familiar one:  _challenge accepted_.

Nope.

Barnes flips the hologram back on, metal replaced by perfect digital skin. Game over. He readjusts his shirt sleeve, crosses his arms, and slouches down in his seat.

Never one to be so easily deterred, Steve steamrolls. "Does it hurt?"

At the last second, Barnes stops himself from rolling his eyes. "Yeah."

"Why don't you let Tony fix it? He had a—"

"'Thing in his chest and now you can't even tell.'" Barnes rattles off the words like a grocery list. He'd heard them once and doesn't need to hear them again. "Because it's my god damn arm."

To start with. Also: in a world littered with people itching to invite him back to HYDRAland, the arm is a bona fide strategic advantage that he can't sacrifice,  _especially_ without a guarantee that Stark's replacement would benefit from the serum. The allure of having two real arms doesn't trump freedom.

"No, it's not."

Incredulous, Barnes slowly turns a stabbing, angry glower onto Steve. Then he sees Steve's earnest, worried, dumb face and remembers: this is still back-alley Steve, fending off bimbos twice his size with trash can lids, fat lips, black eyes, and breathless platitudes. This is kinda what he does.

"You're a fucking idiot," Barnes snaps, far, far less than the lashing he could deliver. "And it's none of your business."

Steve's smile pulls taut the tension wire between them. His response is slathered in sarcasm. "Haven't heard  _that_  before."

This isn't like Brooklyn, when the two of them would jab at each other and start petty arguments over barely anything. This isn't like one of their old insult-fests, building into stupider and dumber strings of made-up put-downs.

This is real.

He can't see where it's going. The fear borne of that uncertainty fuels a new strategy he's learned in the last few years: retreat. "Okay, let's stop."

Everything had been going fine this morning, and, damn it, he wants  _one_ good, clean day.  _One_.

Steve's eyes pierce through him. "No. You said to do this. Let's do it."

Unnerved and not ready for this, Barnes hastily stands up and makes for the hallway. His heartrate picks up, for no reason other than  _I don't know where this is going._

"You lied to me."

 _That's_  where this is going.

Barnes stops mid-stride, his back to Steve. He reminds himself that Steve can't see his stomach bottom-out, or the droplets of sweat dampening his palm, or how he suddenly floats above himself, a step removed from this.

Cotton-mouthed, a part of him is still able to admit, "Yeah, I did."

Steve's tone hardens. "You lied to me."

Whetted instincts force his body to turn and face the threat. Steve's long, fixed stare is cutting and irate.

"Yeah, I did."

"I asked you, and you told me that Zola didn't do anything to you. I asked you about the door handle, and you blew it off. I asked you why HYDRA was fucking with you, and you told me it was a bad grenade." Steve's hand tightens around the tablet stylus. The plastic bends. "You  _lied to me_ for years _._ "

"Yeah, I did."

Steve snaps the stylus in half and flings the tablet against the far wall. His fingers make fists of his khaki pants instead of fists flying at Barnes' face. "Is that all you have to say?!"

For a moment, Barnes is scared. That fright snaps him out of his emotional frenzy. He crashes back into his body, pissed off and ready to fight out of the corner Steve thinks he's put him in.

"Yeah. It was seventy years ago," Barnes replies, putting a snippet of his anger on display. "What, six for you? Catch the fuck up."

Steve's face screws up into a sneer. That's the Steve Rogers that Barnes remembers most clearly: raging, pissy Steve on a tear, before a serum told him how to be a war hero.

"Don't pull that."

"Pull  _what_? Look, I'm sorry that it's all still so close for you, but it's not for me. It's done, it's over. I rolled the dice and I lost and it has nothing to do with you."

 _Had_ nothing to do with Steve. Until Steve became HYDRA's target twice over.

He doesn't take the words back, but the anger dissolves into a deep, wistful regret. He's never needed Steve to dredge this wound. He's never needed  _anyone_  to open it for him.

Steve's sneer becomes anger: a red face, heavy breaths, strained silence. Until: "'Nothing to do with me.' Do you know what they did? Because of  _you_?"

He hasn't needed anyone to dredge that one, either; but it's Steve's to dredge.

None of this was ever supposed to have touched Steve. That brutal, inhuman world was never supposed to have taken him.

Steve closes his eyes, takes a deep, clarifying breath, and opens them again. "Why, Buck."

What Steve wants to know is  _why couldn't you trust me with this?_  It's a fair question, and the answer isn't at all about trust.

"I thought I could make it out and not have to tell anybody."

 _Almost._  Only a few months. In the face of seventy years, it was a fucking rounding error.

"I didn't want to spend my life fighting wars." His voice rises, and he tells himself to lower it, to back this down to something reasonable. "I wanted to go home."

If he looks to Steve for comfort, there's none there for the taking. Steve's mad. "Work on that."

That wound is bigger than it's ever been. It's open and infected and inflamed. The anger rushes back, a lit match finding a gasoline trail.

"What's it like to have a choice, Steve?" Barnes steps into Steve's space, while Steve stands his ground, albeit with a brief flash of stinging hurt in his expression. "Why don't  _you_  fucking tell  _me_  that?"

Those words come from a bad, deep place. Steve doesn't deserve that kind of resentment; he's done nothing wrong.

But Steve had been given a choice—serum or no serum—and all the luxuries that came with that choice. And Bucky – Bucky had been strapped down to a lab table, where there were no god damned  _choices_  – and then spent seventy fucking years being the worst thing he ever could have been.

Steve says the worst, as he grabs his shattered tablet and stalks away. "You had a choice. Everything could've been different."

He'd drowned in that truth for  _years_ , before HYDRA showed some modicum of mercy and took those memories out of his head. It'd been real fun, when he'd put those pieces of his life back together and came up with  _it was your fault you could have changed everything._

"Yeah, I never fucking knew that before! Thanks for fucking telling me!  _FUCK!_ " Barnes yells.

Steve doesn't turn around, and Barnes can't stay – not with adrenaline and rage and guilt and shame and everything, everything in between twisting his muscles and making him feel sick and ready to frag the fuck out.

When he leaves, he slams the door so hard windows rattle. Before he's out of earshot, he hears Sam exclaim, "Are you two for fucking real?!"

Outside, it's hot, the sun high in the sky and pounding its shitty heat against his black hoodie. Barnes doublechecks the hologram, shrugs off the jacket, and ties it around his waist, not missing a step.

He knows where he's going: fifty miles south to the beach in Guarujá. Maybe long, far, and away enough to settle his nerves and calm him down.

He pays cash for the bus ride down to Guarujá and knows the moment that Sam sends out the proverbial distress call: three back-to-back texts from Natasha, followed by phone call after phone call, followed by one final text:  _"When you're ready, call me."_

Not today.

In Guarujá, he finds a decent enough place to sit: near the dunes covered in long grass and sticky thorn plants.

Watches the white surf roll in, back out, back in, and back out.

Closes his eyes to the strong, warm breeze against his face.

Breathes in the air: salt, seaweed, wet sand, sunscreen, fresh seafood from somewhere down the shore.

Shoves his right hand under the sand and digs a hole, separating broken shells from the sand by touch alone.

Listens to the swells of water, roll in and out, in and out. Hears birds  _squawk_  and complain, fighting over left-behind bits of food.

Looks back out over the water: jet skis bounce in the waves, fishing boats lurk along the blue horizon, and birds dive into the water to pull out tiny, gray fish.

Glances at his un-broken, green-bruised right arm and yanks out remnants of sutures, then buries them in the sand.

Stretches his eyes to the blue sky and its sluggish, white clouds.

Sits there, long after the sun has reached its peak, made its course toward the west, and begun the gradual slip into dusk. Long after families have taken their vacation and sunset photographs. Long after the sweltering heat has cooled to a once-was chilly night.

He listens.

Just listens.

And thinks.

Just thinks – about making it home, years and years and years and years ago, about what it'd meant.

It was actually seventy-three years and some odd months ago. His face was pressed into a dirty mattress, rusted chains embedded into the skin of his very human wrists and ankles, when light spilled into the dark room.

Back then, he didn't know German, but he'd picked up enough words that he could string together the gist.

" _Nicht jetzt_." Irritated.  _Not now_.

" _Name_?" Emotionless.  _Name._

" _Ich…Namen nicht_." Still irritated.  _I don't know name._

Fingers curled into his hair, clenching and pulling back, hard. His head lifted, whether he wanted it to or not.

" _Name_?" Angry.

He thought of Steve at home in his first semester at art school and what he would do if word came back. About what would happen to Steve. About what his face would look like. About his promise to Sarah.

He'd fought back once, bit the fucker hard, and, an eternity later, laid curled in a corner, blood in his throat, fire in his lungs, a swollen feeling in his head, thinking he was going to die, he was going to die, he was going to die, and  _he couldn't fucking die because Steve. Steve._

He had to survive this. He  _only_  had to survive: a beating heart, two breathing lungs, blood pumping through his veins. That's all he had to be, in this brutal, inhuman world called Hydra.

"Barnes, James, Ser—"

The guard pushed in deeper, and a pained, half-scream floated out of his mouth, alien to his ears. It was funny, because the guard laughed. It was real fucking funny.

_Make it home. Make it home. Make it home. I have to make it home._

"Hmm.  _Nein_.  _Ich habe ihn nicht_." Still emotionless.  _I don't have him._

The guard pushed his face into the mattress, hard enough that it felt like his nose was breaking, and hard enough that he couldn't breathe. He felt cold fingers; a long, burning prick in the skin of his wrist; and heard " _töte ihn nicht_ "— _don't kill_ —and words he didn't know; and then the light bled from the room.

" _Bereit_?" Excited.  _Ready?_

_Make it home. Make it home. Make it home._

Maybe nine or twelve times later, the light and that person bled back into the room. The only words he could make out were " _Herr_  Schmidt" and "Arnin."

He got cleaned up. Got his clothes back. Someone new took him back to where everyone else was, where Dugan saw the deep, chain-link shaped bruises and cuts around his wrists. Then, Bucky met Dugan's eyes, defiant because defiant was all he ever knew how to be, and Dugan nodded, not a word spoken.

It was a week later, pneumonia broiling inside his chest, when a different guard grabbed his arm and lead him down the same hallways, the ones he'd seen twice before. And he figured – at least he knew what was going to happen.

He actually didn't know shit.

Instead of the small room, it was a large lab that smelled like antiseptic and metal, and the words spoken in perfect, accented English were "your blood has a very interesting marker in it, Sergeant. Let's take a closer look."

Stories about brutal human experiments had gotten around, even before Krausberg.

He knew enough right then. Steve was in art school, had a future, was taken care of, and it'd never meant more than in that moment: he wasn't going to make it home.

The last thing his father had said to him was, "When shit gets rough out there, don't fall apart. Fall together." At the time, he'd thought it'd meant "make sure your unit comes together." That wasn't at all what it'd meant. It'd meant: they could take his life, his dignity, his body, but they couldn't take  _him_.

Only: he screamed so fucking loud that his jaw cracked and popped. If he hadn't been strapped down, he would've clawed out his own fucking eyes. He begged "please stop," and _Arnin_  had said, "But you are doing so well. We may even finish the entire course."

It wasn't just one time: it was over and over and over again, and he was too fucking stubborn to look over and see what  _Arnin_ was doing. He found a real nice water stain on the ceiling and stared at it for weeks—along with a stupidly large map on the other wall. It wasn't so stupid, though, not when no one survived to talk about it.

He couldn't sleep. Could barely think. Hadn't eaten since they'd brought him here. Felt lightheaded, spinning in dizzy, gonna-puke circles. Wanted to tear his hands off, rip his aching head off, stab every fucking nerve ending until they  _all just fucking died_   _and stopped hurting_.

And he wondered – every now and then, not always, not even most of the time – what Steve would think, and that wonder only ever lasted for a sliver of a second. This shit would never touch Steve, and that was all that mattered.

Sophomore algebra. Every day at 11:10 a.m. Mrs. Scott. Would make you come to the chalkboard and solve a problem. If you got it wrong, Mrs. Scott would yell—fucking  _yell_ —"IN-COR-RECT!"

At least she didn't show up.

Steve did. Less small.

The world stopped. Home vanished, a puff of smoke disintegrating into thin air.

_What'd you do._

_Why're you like this._

_How could you do this._

_Why._

_Why._

_Why._

_You took the one thing they couldn't take.  
_

***

"It all could've been different," Steve says, his fork stuck in a pile of scalloped potatoes. Captain Gets Kicked Out of All-You-Can-Eat Buffets has taken all of two bites.

"Rubbing his face in it?" Sam shakes his head, oh so neutrally. "You're better than that."

Even  _if_ everything really  _could have_ been different, time and time and God damn time again.

Otherwise: this isn't Sam's argument, and it's not his relationship. This is on them to work out. He's too close to them, to all of it, to ever give them the counseling they (fucking desperately) need.

Steve shakes his head: lethargic, body too still, face crestfallen. "I'm mad at him."

"Clearly," Sam answers around a mouthful of fish. "You really blame him for HYDRA getting ahold of him?"

"No," Steve answers, a whisper. "I—" His head jerks, a sharp jab to the right, then nothing else.

Sam thinks Steve might, at some irrational level, blame Barnes for HYDRA getting ahold of  _Steve_. Knowing how the Autumn of 2016 went in HYDRA's European funhouse, Sam thinks it would have happened anyway, Kraków be damned.

"Then what is it?"

Steve shakes his head and moves his fork.

"Is it a rational anger, or the HYDRA kind?"

"Neither. Not HYDRA."

That's fine. That's real fine. Sam's got one last thing to say. "Over the past two, three whatever years, I've watched  _both of you_  waste chance after chance. How many second, third, fourth chances do you think you're gonna get here?"

Steve takes a meager bite of potato. "Not many."

"Yeah," Sam agrees. "Not many. That argument earlier, though – that didn't end the way I thought it would."

Steve glances at his shattered tablet—one of his last tangible links to Sharon, irreparably broken—and pushes food around on his plate.

A chair this morning. Then that. But not Barnes' face. Progress – and not because Barnes knows fifty billion languages.

"It was Russell, wasn't it," Steve says, a certain fact said with something of his old authority. "What was she doing?"

It's not that Barnes isn't helping Steve. It's not that this, being here, away from all that, and dealing with six or seventy years of HYDRA trauma drama hasn't been a catalyst for good progress.

It's more than that, and it happened every day at lunch time for seven months.

"She was poisoning your food, like with Sharon."

All the paranoia. All the fixation. All the blackouts and flip outs. Barnes' voice might trigger him – but it's something that Steve, on his best day, can damn well control, like he had twice today.

After twenty-two days here, HYDRA's mindfuck potion should nearly be out of Steve's system. A blood test would absolutely show it, and, when they get back in eight days, it  _will_.

Steve stills. His fork  _clinks_ onto his plate. He swallows, slow and stiff. Then, he disappears into their shared bedroom.

Sam cleans up and retreats to the living room. Waiting, watching the numbers on his digital watch tick further into the night, then further into the morning. Worry flips to anger flips to anxiety to helplessness.

It's nearing twenty hours, and Sam doesn't think he's coming back.

It's 0616, right after sunrise, when the front door finally  _clicks_  open and the asshole finally skulks inside. He brings with him the unmistakable scent of ocean and sand, as well as dirt, mud, and grass on his shoes.

Barnes sees Sam and freezes, only for a second. The door  _clicks_  shut. "Hey."

"I'm going to bed," Sam responds and gets up to do that. "Finally."

"I'm sor—"

"Nope."

"—ry. Okay."

Sam almost feels bad for that, before he remembers that it's past 0600 and some of them here actually have to  _sleep_. He passes Steve in the hallway and glares at him.

These fucking people are going to be the death of  _him_.

***

Sam goes and Steve comes and "I've been thinking" is how Steve decides to approach this.

Barnes heads him off, staring at his hands. "Krausberg was bad. Worse than you know. One of the guards – did some really bad shit, and then Zola did his shit. Thinking of home – of you – is what got me through."

Steve sucks in a breath. "Buck."

He isn't done. "I'm not saying it makes any sense. That it was rational, or right. I just… hated that war, and I knew, that no matter what me and you did, we could never go back."

"We can now."

That's good. Real good. Steve sounds exactly like himself, like he's forgotten that he'd spent three months being tortured, brainwashed, and twisted in circles on HYDRA's accelerated Hotwheels track to hell.

Steve lets out a breath, a little like relief. Then, he gears right back up to another mess.

"What'd that guard do to you?" Steve asks, voice suddenly small and not with any of his confidence. He sounds a little sick, actually.

Barnes shakes his head. Even after seventy years, even after everything HYDRA did, he's not ready to talk about it. Plus: it's  _been_  seventy-three years since Krausberg, so.

"I can guess," Steve says. That "sick" sound in Steve's voice has flashed to anger, as if he's finally put some pieces of some puzzle together.

Barnes doesn't want something Steve can't afford to give.

"Really wish you wouldn't," Barnes says. "And I can't tell you how much I wish you hadn't read that file."

He finally looks at Steve, his neck stiff and hard to move that way.

Steve looks at anything besides Barnes, his face flushed red in a way his fair skin's never been kind enough to hide. "I thought the file was a way to understand, to help. I didn't think you'd ever be like this again. You—"

Had been long far gone.

"Christ," Steve breathes, head planting in his hands.

Awkward silence follows, neither of them sure where else to go.

Barnes has an idea, a selfish one. He's got Steve talking, and, apparently, he's got Steve in a somewhat docile mood. Which is good, because Steve's closer to 1945 than anyone else on this planet. It'd be nice to have his opinion.

"So, I've been digging. Trying to put some pieces together."

Steve drops into the chair across from the sofa, elbows on his knees. He looks like he hasn't slept in too long, and his hair is a crazy mess of blond cowlicks and dry static.

"Oh, yeah?"

"I think Lacy was HYDRA."

Steve's expression turns to skeptical confusion. " _George_  Lacy?"

Barnes nods.

"He went missing in March '45. His whole fireteam. Bucky – he was  _awful_."

Barnes remembers how "awful" Lacy was: how incompetent, how new, how unsure of himself. Barnes remembers  _liking_  the guy, because he listened and tried to learn. He remembers how closely they worked together. He remembers being careless around him, showing things he shouldn't have shown.

"I don't know when, but he came. Acted all surprised to see me. Said he was gonna get me home. He said it'd been eleven years. I killed him that day."

Steve sits back in the chair, confusion still all over his face. Barnes expected some form of anger, not this. "A fake memory? Like your folks?"

Well, at least  _one_  thing's settled: Stark's got a big mouth.

Barnes shakes his head. "I found his body in September, when we were looking for you. That's a confirmed kill."

Steve looks at a point on the floor, eyes distant. He's thinking. "They were gunning after you, the whole time. He was spying on you."

"They call that a 'handler,'" Barnes corrects. "So. You think it's possible, from what you know."

Steve makes a skeptical face. "What about his wife? His boy?"

"Elizabeth Lacy never had a child, and she fell off the face of the planet in 1946. If she ever existed. And Whitman College, where he said he went, wouldn't talk to me, but I couldn't find any record of a graduation announcement. I mean, it's Whitman College;  _you announce it._ "

All this leads to one more theory, one that maybe Steve can confirm or shoot down: "Phillips didn't  _know_ , but he knew enough. I think he sent Lacy after me. I think that's how it happened."

Steve blows out a breath. "How else did they find you." It's not a question. " _Fuck_."

That reaction brings a great deal of relief: to have that theory affirmed, even if it's only from Steve, and even if he'll never know  _for sure_. It's good enough that he can peel George Lacy's image from his fantasy wall of the people he's killed. He can toss away the guilt of thinking someone came to rescue him and that it all could have ended right then and there and that so many lives could've been saved.

Only – Steve's eyes are distant again. Red creeps back into his cheeks and streaks down his neck. His shoulders are tense.

 _Fuck_.

"Steve. Breathe."

Steve blinks, eyes flicking up to Barnes. "Four days after you fell, Phillips wanted to know if you'd ever said anything about Krausberg. If I'd ever noticed anything. I told him off. I wouldn't listen."

Steve's hands tremble.

"He would've sent me, instead of Lacy, and I could've—"

 _Changed everything_.

Barnes leaps off the couch and onto his knees, sliding to where Steve is sitting, like the old days. Back then, he'd have his hand on Steve's Adrenaline Chloride nebulizer in a second flat. Instead, he grips Steve's knees and stares him down.

"Breathe. You're not breathing, Steve."

Exactly like the old days.

"You didn't  _know_ ," Barnes says. "Breathe."

It's a panic attack, not a black out. Even if it was, Barnes doesn't think he'd do anything differently.

Steve closes his eyes, and Barnes sees the moment Steve falls into HYDRA's rhythm. Sees the moment his hands still. Sees his body relax. Watches the splotches gradually fade away.

When he thinks it's safe to talk, he says, "It's over. You have to let it go. You've gotta look forward."

Steve's eyes open, a shining, dark blue in the dim, morning light. "You've always made it sound easy."

Only because Steve's always had it so hard.

Razzle-dazzle time. "The whole thing with Lacy means that Norman killed Eunice."

Steve's face screws up. Razzle-dazzle works. "Buck…" He tilts his head. "Norman Studebaker and Eunice Mahoney?"

Despite himself, despite everything, Barnes huffs out a small laugh, nods, and proudly says, "Yeah."

"They were there?" Steve's having a hard time holding back his own laugh, it seems. "The Bible Thumper?"

Once Steve goes off, hardly able to get out "thumper" before he's laughing, Barnes can't help but laugh too.

He  _remembers_  that day in high school. He remembers when Steve got detention for genuinely groaning "they're gonna start callin' him the Bible Thumper now," while Norman Studebaker, with his gooey Bible and unzipped pants, got dragged down the hallway by his earlobe. He remembers slipping an obscene note under the door of detention hall, so he could sit with Steve.

It's good to see Steve laugh.

The laughs churning out of his own chest don't feel good. They don't feel right. As easy as that, his laughs stop, that moment from another time scratching on the turntable.

The person who fired a rocket into a passenger plane isn't the person from that high school's hallways. Barnes wishes he could say that's the worst thing he ever did. On the list, it's nowhere the near top.

Shame, regret, and disgust twine their way through his body. His throat tightens.

Steve still laughs. "Remember that note you slid under the door?"

Barnes shakes his head, wanting Steve to  _understand_  and  _stop_. Instead, Barnes realizes: Steve is barely in his thirties, and their life back then is still a finger's grasp away.

Steve's got ahold of his moment in time, and he isn't letting it go. "I was in detention with Mrs. McGowan. You slid a note under the door, and it said something like, 'I'm so proud of you, Rogers' and had this real shitty picture of a dick thumping a Bible."

Steve grins.

Barnes hopes he's done talking.

"It looked like a hotdog on a grill. Because you can't draw for shit."

That teenager grew up to torture, kill, and worse on a single word's command. Barnes has no idea why Steve wants him to be that same person.

"McGowan stomped out into the hallway to find you, and you were already there waiting. So we could have detention together. Anything?"

"It was a long time ago, Steve."

He means  _let it go,_ before the chasm gets bigger. It's a naïve thought: there will never be a version of this where  _they_  come out whole, or where Steve understands.

The grin fades from Steve's face. Barnes doesn't try to say anything to bring it back.

"We used to tell each other everything," Steve comments. "What aren't you telling me?"

Barnes laughs again, quick and dirty, and wishes he had a drink of something real, inhumanly strong. "You and I don't remember things the same way."

"You think I romanticize it," Steve says.

"Okay, Sam."

Steve looks away at something random. "I probably do."

A thread of anxiety wraps around the thought of voicing a thought. Something about remembering that life as clear as day, but knowing—god damn  _knowing_ —that there isn't a way back. Knowing that the person Steve thinks he is didn't survive—and knowing that the person he is today often wakes up and wishes he hadn't survived at all.

"No, it was a good life," Barnes says, absolutely nothing convincing about how he says it.

On a good day, he means it. Today isn't a good day.

Steve looks down. His left hand goes to his stomach. "What was the worst thing they did to you?"

A bad thing happens: he opens his mouth to answer, starts to says "I," but can't finish even that much. A weird, crackly sound comes out of his mouth.

He closes his mouth, restlessly looks around the room, and lets out one deep breath.

Steve doesn't let him off the hook.

He stares at scratches on the tiled floor. Dust. Dried pineapple juice. Water spots.

"No," Barnes decides.

He's tortured, killed, ruined, destroyed, and let himself be a person that deserves nothing of what Steve and his friends want to give him. He's damn well capable of saying "no" to Steve Rogers.

Except, his heart skips. His mouth turns dry. A chill trembles through his chest.

Steve doesn't say anything. In that silence, so many thoughts scratch to be heard:  _I did horrible things, I did what they wanted, I did things, I am what they made me, I can't be around you, you remind me of what I'm not._

He chances a glance at Steve and that glance becomes a stare. Steve's eyes are wet, tracks down his cheeks. It's barely imaginable that Steve knows. That means that Barnes is missing something. Why the tears – why –

"You came. You said you'd followed HYDRA. You told me that you knew a way out. I followed you into a dark room, where they drugged me, and hung me, and the first thing he did was this."

Steve pulls his t-shirt up, right up past his nipples, and—

Barnes can't breathe. Can't move his eyes. Can't think.

"It burned. It hurt for days, and, when it stopped, he did it again. I believed it was you."

It's white phosphorus. It's HYDRA's symbol. It's a raised, permanent, healed scar, from his chest to his belly button.

He – That's his playbook. That's what he would've done. He  _knows_  what it does. He – He showed operatives how to do that, how to make it hurt the most, how to make it damage the most, without killing. When to do it again. What to do in between. How to make a person crumble.

That's  _why_  they did it to Steve. Because of  _him_. All of it –

Steve is right to blame him.

Steve drops his shirt.

Barnes still can't breathe. Still can't think. He wants a gun, and he wants a list, and he wants to go.

Somewhere, his own name should be on that list.

It's his fault.

Unexpectedly, Steve hugs him, arms tight and warm. On age-old instinct alone, Barnes' arms come up to reciprocate.

"I'm sorry for what I did," Steve says. "What I've done."

"Don't be sorry," Barnes manages to say.

Steve pulls out of the hug, eyes going straight to Barnes' chest, hand halfway stretched out. Barnes preemptively recoils.

"Can I? Please?"

Finally, he nods, only because he's said "no" so many times already.

Steve lifts Barnes' shirt, like they're two grade-schoolers playing I'll-Show-You-Mine.

The scars are there. The three bullet holes, now tight spider-webs of puckered, pearl skin. Two thin lines down his sternum; only one's recent, and only one's from Steve.

He doesn't have the heart to tell Steve that he's looking at the wrong scars. That first stab wound alone, the one that had damn near cut all the way through his body, had been enough to do it. The HYDRA in him is proud of Steve for it: it'd been a fucking good kill strike.

"How can I not be sorry for this?" Steve breathes, fingers brushing the scar over his right lung, then down the sternum, and then gone.

Easy: "They were never going to let me die. You didn't even come close. Don't fool yourself."

Barnes fixes his shirt and leans away from Steve, arms crossed.

Steve blinks, confused. "No one's told me much."

"Their plan was to revive me and keep you. And then there'd be two," Barnes says, even and neutral. He owes Steve something more, something better than what he helped HYDRA do. "I was your room-full-of-kids moment. The moment you don't  _want_  to come back from."

He's never mentioned those kids to anyone, except Natasha. Steve's smart enough to grab the context and put it together. The twitch of Steve's lip and flicker of surprise in his eyes says it all.

"How do you talk about it like that? So calm?"

"Experience," Barnes replies, willing to go no deeper than that.

"'Experience,'" Steve repeats quietly. "I killed you. I almost let them have you. I—"

"Will learn to live with it," Barnes interrupts, blunt. "Natasha calls it a ledger. Doesn't quite work for me. I picture it as a wall with faces on it."

People aren't names on a list. They're real: they had families; they had lives; they had futures; they had dreams and ambitions. They had one life, and he took it from them. Their faces—in his dreams, mistaken for lookalikes on the streets, in history books—are everything he sees.

"Find something that works for you and work to break it down."

There's a little bit of shock in Steve's expression. His Adam's apple bobs, and the way he swallows is awkward and dry. Undoubtedly, he's used to hearing "it wasn't you" and "it's not your fault" and "it'll get better."

"Buck?"

Always, so much packed into that one little word. Steve could fit a dictionary into it, and, once upon a time, Bucky could piece the words together to find Steve's perfect meaning.

"You'll wake up with it crushing you, before you've even opened your eyes, and, the next day, you'll forget to think about it. And the day after that, you won't be able to breathe again. I don't want you to live like that. I don't blame you. I  _know_  what they do."

He knows what he's done. Steve is living proof.

Steve rubs his eyes, his fingers pressing into the sockets, over and over again. Barnes watches him breathe in three second intervals.

"Do you forgive me?"

There's nothing to forgive, except "HYDRA did it" doesn't erase that Steve was the person behind the gun, or Barnes behind many, many more. "HYDRA did it" means  _shit_ , when it was  _you_  they made do it.

Thing is: Steve's not special. He's another in a long line of prey, and, as far as people who have managed to kill Barnes, Steve's hardly the first. Maybe it's what Steve needs to hear.

"You think that was the first time HYDRA's killed me to get something accomplished? Stop giving yourself the credit."

Once, after the time he didn't say something correctly and Eunice gave him an injection and locked him in their cell, his memory skipped.

One moment, his body shook and his heartbeat battered away at his eardrums, a forbidden scream locked down deep in his throat. The next, he opened his eyes to reams of overhead lights above him, with hard, flat metal underneath him, and his throat nearly too swollen for him to swallow.

_Seventeen has failed. But it will not die._

He wonders what SHIELD did to the cosmodrome. If those buildings still stand, if that cell still exists.

If Eunice really died after Lacy came.

If Norman is still alive.

If he'll ever really know  _for sure_.

At least Steve knows for sure.

Steve sits there and stares, his brain and mouth apparently too tangled up to respond.

"It's a good serum," Barnes says with an easy shrug, although he again feels as though he's floating above himself, watching and listening to himself pretend to be someone who hasn't existed for sixty-four years.

The world with Steve in it - with Becca, his brothers, his mom, his dad, his friends, his wife and that future, himself and that person - is gone. That person died in a cell, in the last moment that the last "kill me" crawled silently past his lips.

He remembers that last moment, and the next when he'd killed a handful of kids in exchange for a handful of hours of sleep. The person Steve is looking for here died then, with those last words and with those young children.

"Yeah," Steve agrees. "I'm glad for that."

Barnes barely hears it.

All of this... This sad attempt at playing pretend, as if there's any sense left to Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, playground friends and wartime heroes.

That day, when he'd killed the first set of kids, and when he'd taken the bloody blanket from the pile of them, he'd glimpsed a silver necklace. It had an identification plate stamped with a date: 18-01-1947. Its wearer was about six-years-old.

It's most of an answer about the person Steve's been trying to find. It's the last thing Barnes can do for Steve.

"1953," Barnes says. "That was it."

"What?"

Barnes gives Steve a half-hearted smile. Steve'll get it. "Nevermind. Look, I'm tired. I'm gonna turn in."

Disappointment shows on Steve's face. "Yeah. Yeah, sure."

"We're good, right?" Barnes asks, more for peace of mind than for anything else.

"No matter what," Steve answers.

Barnes doesn't know if he entirely believes it, but it's good enough.

He gets to his feet and walks past the crocodile clock. Its green, plastic tail shifts back and forth, counting the seconds and minutes. Five hours have slipped by since sunrise, without a blackout or a near-miss.

It's a blink in time neither of them should have had.

***

Sam rubs his eyes and walks down the cool-tile hallway. Tonight marks evening number twenty-three at Casa Melodrama; Sam can easily walk these handful of hallways blind.

 _Seven more days_ , he reminds himself, and then  _home_.

A better home than the one he'd left, even.

Sam rounds the corner into the kitchen and leans in the doorway. A pot of water boils on the stovetop, and the oven dial reads 425 degrees. Sam thinks he smells chicken.

"Man, I have  _never_  seen you cook."

Steve glances up from the tablet in his hand. "Stuffed chicken sounded good."

"Oh, it suddenly sounded good to you? After twenty-two days?"

Another day in another time, Steve would've charged back with, "Oh, so you're counting?"

Steve shrugs, less sheepish than guarded. "We were trying Blue Apron. Neither of us ever learned to cook. Not really. It was nice."

Sharon, Sam realizes. He's talking about Sharon.

"Is she really okay?" Steve asks.

A cheap digital timer lets off a continuous  _beep, beep, beep_.

Sam steps inside the kitchen, kills the timer, and looks Steve squarely in the eyes. "Yes, Sharon is really okay. Last I heard, she had some assignment in Europe."

Shouldn't've said that.  _Totally_  shouldn't have said that.

Steve lets out a breath and nods. "Get Bucky. It's almost ready."

Sam looks in the living room first, then peeks out to the patio, before finally realizing that Barnes is asleep.

The bedroom door is closed. Sam knows better than to force his way in and startle him. He pulls out his phone and dials Barnes' phone number. It goes straight to voicemail.

From the kitchen, Steve whistles "San Francisco" out of tune. Porcelain dishes  _clink_. A glass baking dish  _slides_  onto the hollow metal stovetop.

 _You fucking son of a bitch_.

Sam thinks it, only because he knows Steve would hear it if said out loud. He thinks it, because his gut is telling him one thing only: Barnes is gone.

Despite that, Sam pounds on the bedroom door again. "B! C'mon."

Silence.

Sam opens the door and steps inside the empty room. The bed is made, corner to corner. The ever-present pile of Pepsi cans is in the trash can instead of on the floor. Barnes' bag isn't by the window, which, for the record, is open and missing its screen.

"Are you guys coming?" Steve's voice carries into the room.

Right.

For all Barnes ever talked about Sam getting saddled with their messes, here he is with another one.

Sam closes the window and walks back to the kitchen. It only takes Steve one glance to get it.

For a handful of quiet, tense moments, Steve stands there, gaping and huffing, before his eyes lock on a distant point and his eyebrows press together.

Sam grips the door jamb so hard the white paint flakes onto his hand. It stops him from stepping backward into the slightest of a head start. Adrenaline flushes through his arms and legs, then up his neck.

Steve shuts his eyes and hangs his head, then blows out a short, nasally laugh. "He told me."

Sam's hand drops from the door jamb. He even lets himself breathe. "He told you? That he was taking off? Out the window?"

The look Steve gives Sam is plain resolve. "Call Nat. We're getting him back."

***

The sky was deep blue; the rolling clouds stacked like glaciers. Branches of crinkling, orange leaves rattled overhead, while pink cherry blossom petals floated between bursts of warm wind. Small songbirds fluttered and sang. Too-long blades of grass scratched his bare arms.

That wasn't right.

He sat up to rows of vibrant red tulips, a black wrought-iron fence, and a gray cobblestone pathway that winded around to a black luminaire and brass drinking fountain. Shakespeare Garden.

Could it really –

He looked at his left hand; it was real skin, real bone. On habit, his thumb played with the too-large gold band around his ring finger. He'd taken that off before he'd walked into the enlistment station. He'd never put it back on.

"You loved this place."

Stunned, he stood up and turned, immediately matching that impossible voice to a name trapped between his throat and his thoughts.

Red curly hair, brown eyes, dark freckles across her cheeks. The day they'd met, she'd put him down flat on a gym mat, his nose bloodied, and walked away with a nervous shrug.

She smiled, sad and warm – bleeding pity.

He remembered everything.

The name  _Anna_ died on his open lips, replaced by a hopeful, "Am I dead?"

A flash of lightning splintered across the sky. A jagged barb of pain cut through his chest, and his throat – it felt  _broken_. It felt broken where the collar squeezed.

"For now." Anna tried to smile again. "You'll be all right."

His eyes stung, not because of the pain, but because he understood that  _this_ wasn't real. The horror was real, and it was waiting for him.

He sucked in a deep breath, inadvertently taking in the sweet scents of the flowers and the crisp earthiness of the autumn leaves. The midday sun warmed his face. The lukewarm breeze slipped around his skin. He wanted to stay here forever.

"Please." That impotent word meant nothing. "Please, Anna."

Anna embraced him, strong, always like before. He held onto her desperately.

"You  _will_  be all right," she said. "You will be."

"No, they…" He closed his eyes, accessing information that he knew he no longer had. This place had impossibly given it all back. "They've already…"

He couldn't say  _taken me_.

" _Anna_."

"I know what they've done. I know what they'll do. And you  _will_  be all right. You will be, James."

Another barb of pain splintered through his chest. His throat burned. The left side of his upper body ached, deep and agonizing, where his arm had been cut away.

Hot tears tracked down his face, and he held onto Anna tighter. She smelled liked familiar lavender, like her blouses, like her pillowcases, while familiar terror squeezed his body.

He knew this wasn't real, and he knew he couldn't stay. It was waiting for him.

"Is the worst over?" he asked, only because he knew it had to be. It  _had_  to be.

Her arms didn't leave his body, but her face drew up. Her lips pressed a kiss onto his jaw, and her forehead came to rest on his collarbone, like so many times before.

"No," she said, and then the sunny, blue-sky garden with its leaning, red tulips, its wafting, pink cherry blossoms, and its rolling orange leaves faded from his memory.

In their place, reams of bright lights affixed to a ceiling of gray concrete; cold, flat metal under his body; biting shackles around his wrist and ankles; and a bony, leathered face with inspecting, hard eyes standing over him.

There was no one named Anna. There were no flowers. There was no sky. There were colors – red, black – and numbers – one, two, three – and there were instructions.

"Seventeen has failed," said the bony, leathered Woman. "But it will not die."

He stared past her at the ceiling, obedient. He saw her hand raise high in the air, and he saw it streak back down, but he didn't move, and he barely felt it against his face.

His throat ached, but no one had asked for a report.

Her striking hand stayed on his face, while her other went to a place he  _did_  feel. She leaned her mouth close to his ear, said "I will make it fail," and then did exactly that. His right hand shook and shook and –

The glass in Barnes' right hand trembles. He switches it to his left hand, gulps down the total waste of money formerly known as Scotch, and slides his right hand under his leg. Even there, it shakes.

New memories come at bad times. That one in particular seems to build into worse and worse—and weirder—things. Ghost Anna and the Bitch from Hell, Part Three.

The plane's airframe  _creaks_  and brutally bounces, a moment before the seatbelt light flickers on and the intercom alert tone cuts through the silence of the sleeping jet.

"We're flying through a rough patch of weath—"

Barnes tunes out the announcement and instead looks to the flight tracking screen on the seat in front of him. It's just past 0230, with twelve more hours until Copenhagen.

Despite himself, he thinks of Steve and Sam, and he wonders if, by now, they're on a plane to New York. For sure, by now, Sam is remembering how to hate him, and Steve is hopefully learning to do the same.

Barnes pages for a flight attendant and buys another useless drink. He'd rather blow through a pack of cigarettes, but, this way, Natasha already knows where to find him. Credit cards don't keep good secrets.

He wonders how many more phone calls and texts he's missed from her.

At 1441, the plane touches down at Copenhagen Airport. A carry-on bag to his name, he walks to Terminal 3, buys a Metro ticket at the DSB's ticket office, and rides to Kongens Nytorv.

Outside, it's a cool, overcast 64 Fahrenheit, a welcome shift from the blistering humidity of São Paulo.

Barnes walks the short distance to Café Norden. He buys a simple cup of coffee and waits at a tiny, round table that faces floor-to-ceiling windows, certain that he won't be disappointed.

A third of a way through his seventh refill, Barnes sees her: red hair, red lips, black nails, black clothes, striding straight toward his tiny, round table.

Suddenly, he feels all too aware of what he's done. He reminds himself that he's done much worse than leave at least one person better than how he'd found them.

Natasha sits across from him, eyes looking straight past him, her arms crossed. "You wanted to be found."

"No, I wanted a cup of coffee," Barnes lies.

"Seven of them," she retorts, ice cold.

Barnes unconsciously crosses his arms, right over left, and studies her. Her face is schooled into extreme neutrality, which, in itself, skews against him. She's either pissed or someone else.

"What did I write on your stomach?" he asks.

"Love and home," Natasha responds without the least bit of hesitation. "Interesting way of show—"

He doesn't care to hear the spiel. He knows what he's done. "I won't be around Steve. I'll be what SHIELD needs but not around him."

Her expression doesn't change. Her gaze doesn't stray to him. "Why."

"He showed me what they did. It was me." He tilts his head and finally,  _finally_ catches her eyes. "It was me."

She knows what that means. He shaped her into a Black Widow, the best, the brutal.

Her eyes narrow. " _That's_  the hard part I told you about. You won't outrun it. And it's no way to live."

He doesn't want her advice. "Take it or leave it."

He doesn't know if he wants her to take it, or if he wants her to leave it. He doesn't know.

"The world's a small place, James. You—"

"Don't. Really.  _Don't_."

"—can't avoid him forever."

The café pulls away: the windows melting into the city, the voices of patrons dulling into a hushed hum, the smells of roasting coffee mixing into a sickeningly sweet scent.

"You'll never find me," he thinks to say, because that's the safety point where his mind has decided to lick its wounds. Somewhere  _gone_.

He knows it's a bad, uneven, exaggerated reaction. Running is easy. Hiding is easier. Staying is the hard part, and he's not fucking ready at all. Not after what Steve said, and not after what Steve showed him.

"What SHIELD needs, not around him," Barnes repeats. "Take it or leave it."

Natasha's concerned eyes search his, before she pulls a ready train ticket out of her jacket. She slides it across the tabletop's surface. Without touching it, he sees that it's to Brussels.

With a cool air of finality, Natasha stands. "You'll receive further instructions on arrival."

She walks away without a glance backward.

 _Take care of him_ , he thinks at her.

After the busy sidewalk conceals her, a funny thing happens: he feels unbearably alone in the world, as if he's lost something that he can't ever regain.

***

The story will continue in  _Chapter 4: God Likes Trinity._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: London Thunder by Foals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52XD0Y4vpfQ)


	4. God Likes Trinity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In all Natasha's years, there was ever only one dim light in the depth of the darkness. Only one person who didn’t fit like the others, who hesitated split seconds too long, who bled specks of regret as if they were the molecules of his being disintegrating, breaking up and crumbling like a nose-down Tupolev spiraling at full cruise.
> 
> “It’s Bucky,” Steve had said on that cold day in April 2014. She’d had a bullet in her shoulder then, too. It’d made a sort of sense, she’d thought then, and she can’t say she’d ever been surprised. Not about that.
> 
> SHIELD receives an emergency distress signal from a secret HYDRA installation deep in the Spanish desert. What could go wrong?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes major character death and suicide. See the end notes for a spoiler-ish comment about this chapter and direction of the series.

Upstate, New York. About sixty miles north of Manhattan. The last yellow moving truck pulls onto the two-lane, asphalt road and disappears between two thick rows of autumn-orange trees.

Perched atop the fresh blacktop roof of the new SHIELD headquarters, Steve crosses his arms and sucks in a deep breath that cuts refreshing life into his lungs. From twelve stories up, he has a small bird eye's view of the expanse of Stark-owned land: an open spread of green grasses, acres of trees tipped with age-colored leaves, and the edge of a glittering pond beyond those trees.

He'll never admit: it beats the glassy, metal sprawl of the City. The sound of a hundred birds chirping and crooning beats the sound of a hundred shrill car horns. During the day, the sky here is light blue; instead of commercial jets shaking the building, gaggles of geese soar in clean V-shapes, honks echoing. Even now, as the sun begins its long drop down, cicadas drone, katydids chatter, and crickets chirp.

Here, it's quiet in its own loud way. It's still in its own lively way. It's the way it was growing up, and the way it was in 1940. It's not home, but it's as good as.

Steve'll take it.

"Hey."

Only Natasha can sneak up like that. He hadn't heard the access door open or close; hadn't heard even one of her footsteps; but she's beside his arm, red hair shifting in the stiff, evening breeze.

"It's nice up here," she remarks.

Steve nods agreement. "This was a good move."

Her lips twist into a teasing smile. "Don't let Stark hear you say that. It'll go straight to his head."

"It already has," Steve replies, not so much joking. It's half the reason he's up here: Tony suddenly turning into a bouncing, won't-take-no-for-an-answer tour guide is what the kids call "not a good look" these days. "He really likes the floors."

"He hasn't shown you the labs, yet, then. He had me in the one on Twelve for two hours." Natasha sits down on the roof's ledge, legs kicked out and crossed at the ankle; the good humor curdles into a concerned seriousness. "How are you doing? Are you?"

Steve lifts a shoulder and frowns. "I'm good."

But. Since she went there.

"How is he?"

It's been five months. All Steve knows is that Bucky's safe and "taken care of" – whatever that means. He hasn't heard a word otherwise, not from Bucky, not from Sam, not from Natasha, not from anyone.

 _Give me something. Please_. Steve won't beg.

Natasha doesn't bat an eyelash. "He's real good."

She could be lying, and he'd have no idea. After all, it's her job to lie well.

 _Stop it._  Those are the old thoughts. He's past them – and can't afford to have them.

Steve pushes aside the irrational, old doubt. "And Sharon?"

"Still on assignment in Europe. Hasn't forgive herself yet. Have you?"

Although Natasha tries to hold his gaze, he turns his eyes down to the black slate rooftop. He's not sure what she's asking: has he forgiven Sharon, or has he forgiven himself? Absolutely, and absolutely not.

Either way. "It'd be better if they were here, and you know it."

Eyebrows raised, Natasha tilts her head, green eyes dark. "In time. I miss them, too."

A mocking, bitter scoff held back, Steve bites his tongue to hold something worse back: that she's known Bucky for all of  _maybe_ five months altogether, and she doesn't have a right to pretend to know what it's like to miss him. Same for Sam.

Natasha's more than smart. "You grew up with him. I—"

"Twenty-five years," Steve quickly snaps. Give or take.  _You have no idea_.

Calmly, Natasha continues, "It's his choice. And Sharon's. All we can do is respect that, for as long as it takes."

It must be that irrational, poisoned voice talking to him again: it almost sounds like Natasha's trying to convince herself of that more than him. He doesn't want to ever hear that voice again.

Steve nods and drops the line of conversation. "I still have unpacking to do," he lies.

He'd only brought eight boxes – clothes, books, what Sharon used to call knickknacks. Moving in hadn't taken him long.

"Okay," Natasha kindly relents.

Steve retreats through the roof's access door and down a gleaming set of sparkly-gray, black-specked granite steps. They match the floors that Tony's so excited about.

In the stairwell, each floor is marked by a large number in fresh, glossy black paint. Twelve and Eleven belong to Bruce, with incredible lab space, equipment that makes Steve's head spin, and plenty of room to fuel SHIELD's research and development.

Ten, Nine, and Eight are living quarters for analysts, agents, techs, and others. Seven hosts Avengers quarters, while Six has an armory, training rooms, and the Cafeteria.

Steve pops open the door for Seven and strides down the hallway to his apartment. With a flick of his eyes upward at the optic reader, the wood-covered steel door  _clicks_ open.

With a spacious, furnished living room, dark hardwood floors, and floor-to-ceiling windows that provide a grand view of a grassy, expansive meadow, the apartment should be bright, sunny, and warm.

Even since move-in day, he's kept the lights set to "low." He tells himself he can see fine in the dark.

A dead plant from his apartment in DC sits in its pot, on the floor in front of one of those windows. It's been dead since probably sometime in September 2016. Throwing it away means giving up on her.

The blacked-out windows don't provide any way for that plant to find life. With a couple words to JARVIS, natural light could spill into the room during daylight hours. With that, though, would come his reflection; something he doesn't want to see.

In his bedroom, a sheet of last year's Christmas paper covers the full-length body mirror. It's holly, jolly, and merry. In the bathroom, a fluffy white towel hangs over the counter mirror. Thing is: he learned how to shave by touch during the War, and he doesn't need a mirror to see if his uniform of black pants and a black shirt match.

For better or for worse, it's home. He's had worse.

His smartwatch chirps. Steve glances at his wrist and finds a simple message from Sam:  _"Late dinner? Cafeteria."_

The only part that sounds good is Sam.

Steve heads back out into the hallway made of sparkling granite, trots down the stairwell, and pops open the door for Six. He stalks down another hallway with more granite flooring, a tall ceiling adorned with wide oak beams, and walls of segmented, gray rectangular panels. Every now and then, a potted green plant or a bright blue bench adds a "touch of warmth," or so says Tony. Steve isn't sure what that means.

Outside the Cafeteria, strings of orange Jack-o-Lanterns hang along the wall, leading up to a witch on a broomstick floating in the doorway. The cute decorations don't soothe the knot in his stomach. No, that only tightens and grows as he walks inside the Cafeteria, skims past packed-full tables of employees, and beelines to Sam.

"Not eating?" Sam asks, even though he damn well knows better.

"I ate earlier."

That's true: he had. It'd been something packaged from a café down the street from Avengers Tower, and  _that_ is something Steve's going to quickly miss. The nearest town is at least a half hour away.

Sam takes a big bite of a burger, chews, swallows, and  _doesn't_  lecture Steve on how no one here is HYDRA, no one here is poisoning the food like Russell had, and that Steve has nothing to worry about.

"Stark's got the food service coming in tomorrow. He's really proud of the 'fully stocked kitchen' plan he has."

Even that – Steve's not so sure about trusting that food, either.

Up on Seven, every cluster of four apartments shares an admittedly  _incredible_ kitchen, completely with two wall-ovens, a stove, the biggest refrigerator Steve's ever seen (even bigger than the ones back at the Tower), and every appliance a person could want (some of them Steve can't name). The Cafeteria is a convenience for them.

It still relies on other people handling the food. People he doesn't trust, doesn't know.

Sam gets that. "Or. We can make a grocery run every week. Me and you."

He can't put that on Sam. He's already asked for and taken enough. "You don't need to do that."

Sam smiles around a crisp, golden French fry. "I also don't need Tony Stark deciding my lunch menu for the rest of my life."

"Fair enough," Steve replies, mostly in the hope that Sam will let it drop. He doesn't need someone minding him.

Mid-bite, Sam's smartwatch vibrates. Steve's chirps out an alert a split second later. It can only mean one thing: they're on.

Sam chews and swallows fast enough to choke. "Do we have anyone out?"

Steve pushes back in his chair, stands, and reads the short message:  _emergency mission – Ops ASAP_. "No."

Together, they rush down the hallway toward the east stairwell and haul down two flights of stairs. Through the glossy red door marked "3," Ops is a nondescript door halfway down a glassy hallway on the left.

That's where Steve goes. Sam keeps pounding down the stairs, toward the subterranean hangar bay and his waiting jet.

Inside Ops, Steve strides past the glass conference table and glances up for access into the War Room.

The War Room is dark, even with two dozen flat-screens lit up with imagery, diagnostics, tracking, and coordinates. Two dozen agents sit at stations: some talking, some typing, all working hard.

Maria's waiting by the door. "Seven minutes ago, we received a distress call from an unknown installation outside Murcia, Spain. The call was preceded by a universal SHIELD identification code. We're launching Quinjet Eight with Romanoff and Wilson to investigate; Stark and Rhodes are on stand-by."

Steve glances up at the flat-screen that displays coordinates and GPS information. At speed, the installation is a little over two hours out.

"Any idea who it is?" Steve asks.

Maria shakes her head "no." "Could be anyone who was SHIELD between 2014 and 2016. It's an old code."

A testament to how quickly a jet can be scrambled in this new base, Quinjet Eight's transponder goes live and appears on the coordinates screen. A tech near Steve counts them down: from the elevator lift, to ground-level, to lift-off.

Sam and Natasha blast into the evening, dark night sky of New York. 

***

Ten miles from the targeted installation site, Sam jumps from the back of Quinjet Eight. Wings fully extended, he ignites his thrusters and arcs backwards through the early morning, dark blue sky of Spain. 

Far below, the sun-bleached beiges, shadowed yellows, and spotted greens of the arid Tabernas desert blend together into weathered ridges, jagged canyons, shallow valleys, and dusty, limestone plains. It's an understatement to say it reminds Sam of the Middle East – and even more of one to say it reminds him of Death Valley.

Sam shakes off those memories and feelings. He ignores the twist of his gut. All that matters is this mission and, right now, ensuring Natasha can make a safe landing and a safer infiltration of that base.

"All right, JARVIS, bring me online."

A transparent map of the immediate area overlays the lenses of his goggles. A gridwire, neon orange outline of the installation looms in the distance – along with a low-flying aircraft marked green and two artillery auto-sentries marked yellow.

Not exactly impenetrable defenses.

Sam brings his left arm up and taps an inconspicuous button on a silver bracelet. It triggers a cascade of black and gray armored plates to crawl up both of his forearms. Atop both sets of that armor, a thin missile launcher extends up.

_Thank you, Tony._

Locked.

Loaded.

Sam purposefully overshoots Natasha's jet and blasts toward the installation. From all appearances, it's an old, abandoned, gray-concrete building that stands at one story.

In seconds, he reaches minimum safe distance, targets those auto-sentries, and fires off two mini-missiles. He doesn't stop to wait around and see if those missiles find their targets. They will.

Sam breaks from his flight path, angles up, and spirals higher into the sky. Focused on taking out that green-marked aircraft, he shoots toward it at three miles and counting.

"Targets A and B have been eliminated," JARVIS informs. "Destruction estimated at 97%."

Sam allows himself a small smirk. That's as near a bullseye as it gets.

He closes in on the aircraft. Looking through the targeting overlay in his goggles, Sam can actually see it: a gray Russian Mi-26T. It's a large transport helicopter with a red star on the back of the fuselage. No question: it's HYDRA.

Taking out gun sentries on the ground is one thing. Shooting down a suspected enemy aircraft in someone else's airspace is a tiny little bit different.

"Base, Falcon. I'm approaching a Russian transport helicopter, in-flight. Request instructions."

Steve's voice fills Sam's ear. "Falcon, Base. Hold fire and shadow only. SPAF is en route and will intercept."

Then SPAF should be able to take care of it, while he turns back and takes the base with Natasha. But those aren't the orders. "Roger that."

Against his better judgment, Sam intercepts the helicopter: 200 meters east of it, matching the altitude of 8,000 feet and the helicopter's relatively slow speed. He keeps far and clear of the booming, whooping blades; admittedly, the lashing, whipping air feels refreshing against the burgeoning heat of the desert day.

"Base, Black Widow. Eight is landed. Proceeding with recon as planned."

 _There's a plan?_  Sam thinks to himself. Last he knew: not really.

"Black Widow, Base. Roger that. Proceed."

Steve sounds perfectly professional, a perfect fit as their eyes, ears, and expert guidance back at Base. There's no question, though, that the bare hint of impatience in Steve's tone leads back to one truth: he wants almost nothing more than to be back out here with them.

That's a long time away, at best. At worst, this is the best it gets.

"Base, Falcon. Bogie intercepted at 200 meters. Altitude and speed matched."

Sam tries to look inside one of the helicopter's round windows but can't see anything except shadows. He wonders how many people are inside; who they are; where they're going; what they were trying to do – the mystery of HYDRA. He also wonders if the person who sent the distress signal might be inside; if that person can see him; if that person is wondering, hoping, praying that he actually  _does something_.

"Falcon, Base. Acknowledged and receiving telemetry from JARVIS. Proceed without engaging."

Orders being orders. "Roger that."

Sweat beads along Sam's hairline. For a desert, the Tabernas offers a relatively gentle heat – but it's still  _hot_. Dry. Borderline suffocating. He'd love for the Spanish Air Force to come, like,  _right now_ , so he can knock out the base with Natasha, figure out what happened inside, and get the hell out of here.

Peel off his sticky, wet clothes.

Take a long, cool shower.

Eat a big, warm meal.

Wipe the basketball court with Steve, who can throw frisbees all day long but is too damn bulky to be anything more than decent at—

_BOOOOOOoooooom._

The rumble sputters along the ground far below. Even from 8,000 feet, Sam sees violent vibrations upheaving rock, sand, and dirt. Sky-high plumes of gritty, gray dust spew into the air.

"What… JARVIS, what was that?!"

A red alert on his lenses pulls his attention from the helicopter toward the installation site. The beige ground around the old building collapses into a wide, circular sink hole, swallowing the walls, the roof, the rock, and Quinjet Eight into nothingness.

The helicopter forgotten, Sam stops flying and holds in place. "Natasha? Natasha!"

Natasha's in there – and his comm replies with static.

***

It doesn't start with a thunderous, booming growl.

It starts with empty, abandoned hallways. Vacant, hollow rooms. Not a soul in sight. Not one.

It starts with the instinctive, sinking  _knowledge_ that this—all of this—is a set-up.

It starts too late, when Natasha is already precisely clearing the dark, red-tinged second subfloor.

Then comes the growl.

Then comes the deafening gale of buckling metal girders and beams, disintegrating concrete walls and ceilings, and teeming tons of earth, sand, and limestone.

Then comes the rumble under her feet, above her head.

Then comes the intense, liquid quivering of the structure around her.

Natasha runs.

Down the hallway, feet light atop the liquefying, crumbles of the floor, she runs through a curtain raining thick dust, sharp shards of concrete, and slivers of glass. She can no longer see the stairwell door.

But it's there. It's there, and it leads to the safest part of this structure.

Her comm crackles with a half-formed word that sounds like part of her name. There's no time to respond.

There's no time.

A concrete beam crashes to the floor, right in front of her. On hard-won reflexes alone, Natasha leaps over it, transitions into a somersault, and launches to her nimble feet. She shoulders through the stairwell's steel door.

_CLANG-CLANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-CLANG!_

All she needs to know is that  _those sounds_  are coming from above. The smoke, the dust, the destruction is coming from  _up_.

Natasha dashes down – down the stairs – and disobeys every instinct, every piece of training, every textbook tidbit of knowledge that screams at her to  _go up – up – up!_

Down is a death sentence: buried under tons of concrete, a slow, suffocating death.

So is up: killed quickly – or buried alive by rubble for days, a slow, gruesome death.

Subfloor Six goes by.

Her weapon-mounted light bobbles and wags, erratically casting yellow, quick gazes and dark, confused shadows against the cracked walls.

Subfloor Seven goes by.

Subfloor Eight. She dares to stop.

Dares to hunker in a falsely comforting corner: weapon in her hand, arms covering her head, eyes peering from between the folds of her black uniform.

White dust and gray ash sprinkles atop her hair, her arms, her shoes, like the first, fluffy snow of the year.

The ceiling doesn't collapse.

The walls don't crumble.

She's not incinerated in a blast of yellow-orange heat.

It's fortified.

"Why?" was the question she'd been taught to ask of every situation: take nothing, except orders, at face value.

So: why fortify this part of the complex to withstand their own base detonation? What were they keeping here that was so important? Both good questions better answered later.

Black, putrid smokes blooms into the stairwell. Her eyes sting and water; lungs, burn with it. The smoke thickens and swells, so dense that she can't see the floor, the walls, her own hands.

Knowing she can't stay near that smoke, Natasha slinks through the door for Subfloor Nine. She closes it tight behind her with a quiet  _CLICK._

Dry, hacking coughs surge from her chest, as she aims her sidearm down the dark hallway. She blinks her gritty, teary eyes and squints.

Nothing. It's as empty as the rest of this base.

Except for a dim light flickering from under a closed door midway down.

Natasha takes a deep, cutting breath and lets it back out with a ferocious cough. Black-tinged phlegm coats the back of her hand; she wipes it on her pants.

Back pressed against the same wall as the lit doorway, Natasha inches down the hallway, weapon held in front of her. Its mounted light provides little relief.

Five inches from the doorway, she smells blood.

Two seconds later, she discovers why.

Dark, dried blood slathers the inside of the door's narrow, vertical window. On the floor, she sees a dark patch of blood that had seeped under the thin threshold.

Natasha loosens her grip on her weapon, grasps the lever handle with her free hand, and turns it. She pushes the door open, weapon aimed.

There's no need. Someone has already been through here.

Natasha steps over a dead body and surveys the room. Bright, quivering generator lighting reveals a small medical lab, outfitted with an empty, clean autopsy table and an equipment table busy with vials, syringes, and basic examination equipment.

The rest of the lab is a massacre. Two dead soldiers—both of them missing service weapons—and four dead people wearing once-white lab coats. Natasha toes one of them over to find a neat, fresh slash wound across the jugular.

Not a set-up. Not a trap. Not entirely. The distress call had been sent genuinely, and HYDRA self-detonated the base – waiting until SHIELD came to do it.

_Who sent it?_

Opposite the lab table, a wall is papered with large screens, their images still pulled up. She recognizes them as PET scans of a brain, and she knows enough to know that the asymmetrical, widespread black isn't healthy. A monochrome MRI scan shows white splotches and wires leading to several rectangular devices.

Disinterested, Natasha turns away from the brain scans.

On the examination table, droplets of half-coagulated blood resemble candlewax – left too long unattended, dripping. Glass from an unlabeled, broken vial mixes with it.

Out of curiosity, she hovers her phone over the blood and scans for DNA.

She has no expectation that it will match to any sample in SHIELD's database. This entire base seems to be a medical research complex; human experimentation is a foregone conclusion. Undoubtedly, the blood belongs to an unfortunate human being, caught in the wrong pla –

_Barnes, James B. (SHIELD). DOB: 3/10/1916. Height: 5'11". Identifying marks: metal prosthetic, left arm. Status: Active._

A picture comes with the results. It's an official one, taken in October 2016 before he'd left Stark Tower. It had gone on an access card that also served as a badge, and he'd complained, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" She'd answered, "Use it."

It throws her for only a moment. There's no conceivable way that HYDRA has James here. SHIELD would have known.

Natasha pockets her phone, skeptical not of its results but of the source of the blood. The broken vial on the table points in a certain direction.

On a rolling cart near the lab table, she notices more vials of blood, an empty syringe, a roll of clear medical tape, a yellowed iodine swab, dried alcohol wipes, and an array of unmarked medicine vials.

She doesn't spare herself time to second-guess, speculate, or worry. James is safe in Berlin, running busywork missions with one of their best agents.

The only explainable conclusion is that HYDRA is experimenting with leftovers of James' blood, likely trying to recreate a good serum, and their test subject had taken advantage of the diversion.

Meanwhile…

She's trapped under at least five floors of concrete and debris, inside a fortified HYDRA installation, alone except for an unknown number of HYDRA operatives – and a person with unknown intentions.

She means to find that person. She can't afford a wild card in this hand.

Natasha looks at the bodies again, before evaluating the egress points. Only one exists: the door leading back into the hallway.

Natasha backtracks through that door. She has two options: right or left. Her gut points her left, down to the opposite stairwell than the one she'd entered from.

She finds nothing more than empty rooms, storage closets, and a maintenance bay full of floor cleaning chemicals. That leaves her at the end of the hallway, into another stairwell.

Inside, toxic black smoke, soot, and ash dwindle from the upper floors. If her wild card found a way up, he or she is either stupid – or desperate to escape.

The stairwell leading down is clear and open, for the most part.

She's better off staying put, staying findable and as near the surface as possible. But the mission is to investigate the distress signal, and  _that_  hasn't changed. Someone with a SHIELD distress code was or is here; investigating that to a finite conclusion is worth her safety.

Natasha goes down. 

***

It takes Tony and Rhodes 114 minutes to blast their way across the ocean and to the destroyed Tabernas base tucked into the jagged, limestone badlands of Granada Plateau.

Natasha doesn't answer even one of Sam's endless attempts at communication. She's dead, or buried, while he uselessly paces under the desert heat for 114 minutes.

Sam spends each minute helpless to do  _anything_.

Tony lands, while Rhodes flies low and surveys the puckered earth and smoldering remains of the once-was HYDRA installation.

Tony's helmet shifts away to reveal a worried, tired face already moist from salty sweat. "Any sign?"

Sam shakes his head. "Nothing. Not one person."

Tony nods his acceptance of that answer and looks past Sam to the remains of the base. "Two jets are right behind us; couldn't keep up. SPAF said the helicopter crashed – no bodies to be found, but they're picking up radiation from the debris. Nothing from Romanoff?"

Sam doesn't care about the helicopter, that it crashed, or whether or not SPAF ever finds the bodies of HYDRA's latest crop of assholes.

Sam  _does_ care about Tony asking the same question twice. A shade removed from irritated, Sam sharply repeats, "Like I said: nothing."

Tony glances back at him, a moment before Tony's helmet reconfigures itself over his face. Iron Man's resonant voice instructs, "Get some water when those jets get here. JARVIS – get me a full-spectrum scan of that base and prepare to deploy the Full Monty."

Later, Sam would learn in an AAR that the Full Monty is actually "FLMNTI": Focused Laser for the MouNtain Terraforming Initiative. Something about an old Stark Industries project for the US military that had been SHIELD-adapted for SAR missions.

In the moment, Sam had no idea how they were planning on rescuing Natasha—or her body—out of tons and tons of shredded concrete, steel, and debris. He was relieved to hear that Tony had  _something_ up his sleeve – and also to hear about that water.

Within twenty minutes, Quinjets Three and Seven approach and touch down in a flat limestone LZ about three hundred feet from the base. The ramps lower and a trove of medical personnel, engineers, and black-clothed SHIELD agents filter out of both.

The engineers flock to Tony and get a face full of floating-six-feet-off-the-ground hologram. It looks like that full-spectrum scan of the base, and none of them waste time marking up the hologram display with circles, squares, and points of interest.

The agents beeline to Rhodes and are quickly deployed to establish a defense perimeter. That's what Sam loves about the military: that's all there fucking is to it.

The medical personnel pop up a quick tent. After guzzling four bottles of water, Sam helps them offload supplies and build a triage zone. It keeps his mind off worrying about Natasha—worrying doesn't help her, doesn't change what's happened to her—and obsessing over what Tony could possibly have in mind.

Tony's voice cuts through the limited, Avengers-only comm. "Iron Man, Base. Do I really have to request permission for this?"

Maria responds almost instantly. "Base, Iron Man. Spanish authorities have granted permission. You may proceed."

"So… The answer is 'yes.'"

Sam can all but see Maria rolling her eyes – while Steve, with any luck, has kept it together. He and Natasha are close, and she's been his shoulder now for a long time. Losing her might mean losing him, all that hard-won stability and progress putrefying into grief-fueled wrath.

"Base, Iron Man. Yes, the answer is 'yes.' Stop wasting time."

Sam's watch reads 3.3 hours since the base imploded. Time wasted could make the difference between life and death.

He walks away from the medical tent and into the empty area a couple hundred meters from the destroyed base. Rhodes has flown clear away, that perimeter of his expanding to a radius of 400-meters.

Tony flies even further out but hangs out low in the sky. "All righty, everybody. Don't move. Keep clear of the base. JARVIS – let's make this daddy dance. Deploy the Full Monty."

Sam waits for a giant device to drop from the sky, or for a massive machine to appear from thin air, or for something red and gold to razzle-dazzle and make this magical day from hell all better.

It's so much more anticlimactic than Sam ever would have dreamed. And it takes four minutes to happen.

A matte gold cylinder about the size of one of Sam's tennis shoes drops from the sky: cuts through the clouds, spins through free air, and then deploys the cutest little thrusters Sam's ever seen. It uses those thrusters to slow itself down about a hundred meters above the center of the base.

Sam squints to see it. The gold metal glints in the sunlight, which helps. Given its size, it has to be some sort of scanner, something to help plan for –

"You all think this is stupid," Tony says, without giving time for everyone on the ground to agree. "Don't be alarmed: I can read your minds. But, please know: just you fucking wait. Here goes."

A mass of green lasers sprout from the bottom of the cylinder. Instantaneously, the lasers pierce through the crumpled dirt and piles of broken concrete. The ground under Sam's feet vibrates, rocks and dirt jumping and hopping like bursting kernels of popcorn.

"What—" Sam doesn't finish asking the question.

Instead, he flies over to the engineering camp, where that mid-air hologram is being assailed by the intense stares of three engineers, two female and one male.

It shows what Sam thinks is the inside of the base. At first, he sees only packed, dense debris – dirt, concrete, metal, the works – and one side of the screen continues to show that. The other side of the screen shows clean, cleared space.

"It's evaporating the molecules of the dirt and material," one of the engineers marvels. "Look at that. Where's the output?"

Sam thinks to warn them to  _stop, no, you'll wind him up_  – but this little cylinder thing is the magical razzle-dazzle that might make this day all better.

So long as:  _be alive, Nat_.

("Built it in a cave," Tony boasts, then: "Just kidding. Could've!")

***

Natasha creeps down a floor and pushes open a still-shiny steel access door. Weapon aimed, she enters a different hallway. Though damaged and soot-covered, she notices that the floors are fresh and smooth poured concrete, while the walls haven't taken on the usual tinge of pungent age.

Eyes adjusted to the dim, red lighting, she sees the shadows of closed doors all along the walls. As she walks, she tries some of the stainless steel handles, finding each of them locked, without any sign of recent disturbance.

She comes to a T-intersection about a hundred meters down. Along the floor, ash and dust have collected into a fine layer.

To the right, it's untouched, like morning snow. The corridor itself remains lit by red emergency lights, exactly as it should be.

To the left: a thick, long drag mark reveals a path. That corridor is dark, without lighting.

Natasha squats down low and shines the light of her weapon at the path. It's wide – wide enough to be a body. Messy scrapes of handprints dot the trail. Somebody crawled.

Weapon aimed, Natasha slinks down the corridor, eyes primed and searching for her wild card.

The darkness devours her weapon's light, which barely shines through the space in front of her. Her visibility is  _maybe_  three feet.

That's why she doesn't see two shadowed bodies sprawled on the floor, until she's nearly on top of them. That's why she doesn't realize the light bulbs above her have been shot out, until her boots  _crinkle-crackle_  atop the broken bulbs.

Goosebumps prickle up the backs of her arms. She catches up to the play, a moment too late.

A stinging pain erupts in her left shoulder. The accompanying  _BANG!_  warns her of the bullet.

Natasha twists away and spins herself into the air. She lands on her left foot, squats, and drops her center of gravity. As she goes down onto her butt, she pushes off the floor, sliding backward with her sidearm aimed –

_BANG!_

That hadn't been her.

Only one. The sound of the bullet doesn't reveal a direction. The wall next to her doesn't splinter or throw fragments. A soft  _clang_  echoes from the hallway.

Every part of her knows what's happened.

She skids to a stop, weapon aimed steady, eyes trying to cut through the darkness, and her entire body listening for threats.

There are none. Not anymore.

Natasha stays low and compact, left shoulder limp at her side. She unsnaps her light from its scope and rolls it down the hallway. She aims her weapon again, for enough seconds to say she followed protocol.

In those seconds, she notices the  _drizzle_  of disintegrated concrete sprinkling onto the floor. The  _groaning_  of warped steel above her, maybe or maybe not strong enough to support the collapsed, burning building above it. A broken pipe somewhere inside the wall, whispering  _drip-drip-drip, drip-drip-drip_ ,  _drip-drip-drip_.

The light reveals an unsurprising, shadowed body: wilted, supine, and motionless on the floor.

The burnt crisp of spent gunpowder tickles her nose, even after all these years, but her stomach doesn't turn at the certainty of what she's going to find.

The wild card has made her life easier.

She walks to the body, calm and controlled. In the dark, she distinguishes the shadowed outline of a handgun, then twists it from a ragdoll hand and slips it into her own SOB holster. It fits, even.

She presses two fingers against the warm neck and patiently waits five seconds, confirming: no pulse.

Like she'd been taught, she takes the closest appendage—a right arm—and drags the body back the way she'd come.

Metal  _scrapes_  along the floor.

A belt buckle, maybe. A knife. Gear.

In the lighted hallway, she drops the lifeless arm, turns, and doesn't flinch.

Doesn't breathe.

Doesn't blink.

Doesn't move.

Her vision blurs from staring for too long.

In all her years, there was ever only one dim light in the depth of the darkness. Only one person who didn't fit like the others, who hesitated split seconds too long, who bled specks of regret as if they were the molecules of his being disintegrating, breaking up and crumbling like a nose-down Tupolev spiraling at full cruise.

"It's Bucky," Steve had said on that cold day in April 2014. She'd had a bullet in her shoulder then, too. It'd made a sort of sense, she'd thought then, and she can't say she'd ever been surprised. Not about that.

He's surprised her today, though. He's done finding her.

 _Бог тро́ицу лю́бит_ , they say. "God likes trinity," it means, and that itself means  _the third time is lucky_.

***

Four days after their icy conversation in Copenhagen, James sent one, solitary text message to Natasha: "Thanks for fucking me over. Real nice. We're done."

Many would say that close personal relationships weren't necessarily her strong suit – but  _what?_  Hill had made the assignment; by all measures, it was a plum station in a good city with one of their best agents.

Natasha called his phone, surprised when it went to voicemail after one ring. He'd swiped her.

Natasha texted James' partner: "How's everything?"

"He's fine," came the response. Then a quick follow-up: "And expensive."

That was great. Helpful.

Natasha texted James: "Care to elaborate?"

To his credit, he stayed the promised course with absolute silence.

"What do I do?" she asked Sam, since, as established, personal relationships were not her strength.

Sam read James' text and laughed, loudly and openly, right in the middle of the Tower's cafeteria. No one cared. "He thinks he's one to talk. Oh, man, that's priceless!"

Natasha stared at Sam, purposefully blank but kindly patient, given she knew many, many ways to kill him with her fork.

"What'd you do?" Sam asked.

Natasha hiked her eyebrows and waved her hand – like she knew?

"Well. Now he's bailed on—"

Unannounced, Steve dropped a takeout bag from someplace down the street onto their table and sat next to Sam. The spoken rule was that Steve would hear nothing—absolutely nothing—about James, either good or bad, beyond, "He's working for SHIELD, and he's fine." Despite the undeniable improvement in his overall demeanor and temperament, Steve still tended to fixate.

A thick golden French fry halfway to his mouth, Steve glanced up at Natasha, then looked sideways at Sam. He'd brought proverbial crickets to the table and knew it.

"Really?" Steve rolled his eyes. "Fine."

He took his bag of food and left, far out of earshot.

Sam chewed his food and changed his original thought. "He pushes when he's freaked out. It's probably not anything you even did."

Natasha didn't think so and still didn't know what to think.

A week turned to two turned to three and then to a month.

Then two months.

She wasn't going to beg, but she tried one more call. That one went for eight rings before an automated voicemail message read her his phone number. She tried one more text:  _"Talk to me."_

Three months.

Four months.

The plan was to give James and his partner a full twelve months removed from SHIELD proper. Time away from trauma, from high-stakes pressure, from do-or-die missions, and from the loved ones who had warped into draining stressors and terrible reminders. "A long-term investment," Maria justified it, "with short-term pains."

It didn't have to be a time of no-contact, or a sort of exile. It didn't have to be what he'd made it.

Once, he'd written "home" and "love" up and down her body. She knew that he'd meant it, and she knew well the struggles of surviving HYDRA. Clint and Nick both had battle scars from her journey.

Home would be here, and he would learn that he didn't have to push.

Five months came and went.

Eight days after, he's gone forever.

***

Natasha examines the damage: a bullet between the eyes, a clean black hole ringed by blackened, burnt skin, and a curved line of blood that hasn't made it all the way down his right cheek.

Not once in seventy years had he tried to put a bullet in his brain. He preferred chest shots, both in how he tried to leave this world and in how he decided to take it from his targets.

"Heart first. Head shots require precision and aren't guaranteed," he'd said, decades ago, and pressed his hand against her chest. "Anywhere here with a hollow point, you're dead."

His body tells a story, and she reads it.

He's wearing only a black shirt, black tactical pants, and unlaced boots. No holsters. No gear. His left hand is a tight, hard fist. His right one is a mess of tight, thick scars through the palm, topped by a tape-slicked IV catheter.

Eyes closed. Hair still cut short. Dry blood splatter on his arms – his right one littered with worm-like scars and finger-tip shaped gouges. Rings of dark green and deep purple bruises around his right wrist – deeper around his throat. Cracked lips. Sallow, pale skin; the skin beneath his eyes is thin, shiny, and purple. Faded bruising on his cheekbones and jaw.

He'd fought.

Natasha kneels, hand cupped over her mouth and nose to block the stench of blood and gunpowder. She rests her weapon on the floor and brushes her fingers over his cheek, confirming that it's not a person wearing a mask.

By habit alone, she again presses her fingers against his inert carotid artery. His skin is still warm; blood tacky but not dry. There's no chance.

Three separate sets of footfalls echo from down the hallway. She hears a male voice yell "there!" Natasha picks up her weapon and shoots all of them dead, with hardly a glance in their direction.

She puts her entire attention back on James, in time to see the plates on his arm shift and his metal fingers make an impossibly tighter fist. Fresh blood trickles from his nose.

There's nothing left in his brain to tell his lungs to breathe or his eyes to open. The rebooted ICD in his arm—the one Stark had been able to deactivate but not remove in 2016—can do nothing but push blood through a dead body.

Natasha grits her teeth and swallows sorrow.

Like a time not so long ago, she won't leave his body anywhere near HYDRA.

Further down the hallway, she forces her way into a locked, red-tinted laboratory marked 9A-2.

It's big enough to hide and fight in, and it's where she slides James' body.

Behind a work table, she runs her hand through James' hair. Skin-to-skin contact would settle him in the slightest, most powerful of ways.

Again, his left hand makes a tighter fist, and his body jerks and bleeds.

 _Это ещё цвето́чки, а я́годки впереди́_ , they say. "These are just flowers; berries will come soon," it means, and that itself means  _this is nothing compared to what is to come._

***

Twelve hours and twenty-three minutes after the base imploded, Sam is the first one through the door marked 9A-2.

With a blinding, high-powered flashlight in his hand, he combs the room from side to side – and easily finds Natasha: standing near the corner of the room, her sidearm hanging by her side, finger on the trigger.

"Stand down," Sam says. "The base is clear to this level."

Between the red emergency lighting and his overpowered, small-dick-compensator light, it's hard to really see her. Shadows play tricks on the human eye, and the mix of lights creates a false frenetic energy.

She looks more than shaken, more than upset – devoured, maybe, is almost a right word. He doesn't think it's because of the light.

"Nat?"

Her finger leaves the trigger. With her head, she gestures downward, near her feet.

Reluctant, Sam takes uneasy steps around a set of steel lab tables—stacked with centrifuges, chemical vials, DNA sequencers, typical HYDRA shit—and shines his light toward the floor, no idea what to –

_No._

_No._

He sinks to his knees, and his eyes drink in the impossibility laying on the floor. He reaches out to touch the right hand.

It's already cold and stiff.

Dead.

" _I'm sor—"_

" _Nope."_

"— _ry. Okay."_

There was supposed to be time.

He was supposed to be safe, doing SHIELD's low intensity work in former Eastern Bloc areas, no big deal. Maybe – and it's all that makes sense – he ended up here as part of one of his missions, and someone got the jump on him – but that wouldn't make sense of the black, lacerated bruises around his wrist and neck, or the discolored gouges on his arm, or the IV catheter taped to his hand. All of that speaks of time.

"How…"

"He shot himself in the head. He ran out of ammunition."

Sam stretches his eyes up. Natasha still looks devoured; she sounds detached. She's been here with Barnes' dead body for nearly thirteen hours; all things considered, she looks and sounds great.

"Don't make me say it."

Sam's never heard Natasha plea and never wants to hear it again. He nods and speaks into his comm. "Quinjet Seven, Falcon. Requesting a body bag and med transport from 9A-2."

"Falcon, Quinjet Seven, transport en route. ETA 5."

Natasha gives him an infinitesimal nod of thanks. "Don't leave him."

"Whoa, Falcon Crest, care to clarify?" Tony. "How's everyone's favorite spider?"

Sam wets his tongue and forces words from his brain. "Black Widow is fine. It's someone else."

"Aaaaaand that someone else issss…."

Sam won't make Natasha say it. But he knows that Steve listens to the comms in Ops.

That hits him like a bag of bricks. Steve. Christ,  _Steve._

"Falcon?"

Sam takes a breath, lets it out, closes his eyes, and fakes it. "You'll have to wait and see. We're a grab bag of surprises down here."

"Oh, goody. Better be good."

"I never disappoint," Sam responds. "Thirty minutes or it's free or something."

"Yeah… Work on that."

Natasha's jaw clenches so tightly he swears he can hear her teeth creak. Her sharp, shaking intake of breath reveals it's not anger but another something she's never showed, not even the other time Barnes was dead.

Sam watches her walk into the hallway and hears her slide down the wall, culminating in a  _thump_  and the scratch of boots pulling across concrete.

He looks down at his friend.

His forehead is burned, with a round, black-rimmed hole drilled through his skull. Sam knows from the Middle East how quickly a bullet to the brain kills. He knows from his schooling what a bullet does to the brain, especially when fired against the skin, like this one had been.

Sam would like to say it was quick and painless, and, while technically true, the rest of the body says otherwise.

Sam sits, arms rested on knees, and breathes through the fingers he has clenched over his mouth and nose. He's breathing in the decay of a friend.

 _Steve_.

As promised, the body bag, stretcher, and med team arrive. If they're a minute late, Sam doesn't know; it seems like hours have dragged on by. The crew is mostly new, hired to staff the new headquarters, and Sam thinks only one of the three recognizes the face.

"Is this…"

She does recognize Barnes, and Sam recognizes her. She was part of the 2016 med team.

Sam nods quickly. "Keep it off the comm."

"Yeah, of course."

Sam walks with Natasha up the eight flights of newly-cleared stairs. She refuses a nose mask, even though the worst-hit subfloors are still filled with thick, black smoke and gravel-laced dust particles. The higher they climb, the hotter it becomes, too: capturing the desert heat from above. Sweat prickles and coats his entire body.

It's not until Two that he notices the bloody wound in her left shoulder.

"Nat, you're hurt."

"He shot me."

Good to know. He'll make sure she gets medical attention.

The stairwell on One leads to a metal ladder poking through the twisted remains of the surface structure. Yellow sand and marlstone from the Tabernas drizzles into the opening.

Natasha climbs the ladder first, helped through the opening by a SHIELD agent. Sam goes next and has never been happier, ever, to be outside in his life.

It's still daylight, at least: sunny, cloudy sky, a dry 85. The ugly, jagged limestone badlands still surround them. Chalky smoke sticks to the back of his throat, and he wipes black-gray slime from the edges of his nostrils.

With all the benefits of the soon-to-set sun, Sam can finally  _see_ Natasha. Covered in black soot and gray ash, Natasha looks pale, ghostly. Her red hair is caked in it. Her skin has drowned in it. In the base, he hadn't noticed the tear tracks carving lines through the layers of grime. Sam tries not to look, to acknowledge.

Balanced on a mass of concrete chunks, he waits next to Natasha and watches the team maneuver the black body bag through the tight opening.

He's not nearly as heavy as he looks. Sam remembers that.

Natasha follows the bag, and Sam follows her. The debris field gradually levels into flat, packed sand and limestone, and then to the LZ with the med tents, engineering cluster, and patrolled perimeter.

Tony and Rhodes are already waiting at Quinjet Three: guzzling bottled water and broiling inside their helmetless suits, faces shiny with smelly sweat.

"Nat needs medical attention," Sam announces, regardless of how pissed Natasha might get. "GSW, left shoulder."

"It's a flesh wound," Natasha responds, walking straight past them, following the bag. "It's been hours."

"Hours in toxic smoke and who knows what else," Rhodes says, genuine concern clear in his voice. "Get checked out and cleaned up."

"Sure," she replies.

"Ditto." Tony nods toward the bag being loaded into Quinjet Seven. "Who's in the mystery bag?"

Sam tells them: a single name and a cause of death, the only two data points he knows.

Bruce owes Sam five dollars – for Sam being the first to make Tony speechless this month.

***

Months before Steve came to a riverbank to find peace, Natasha had come. It hadn't been the first time, but it would be one of the last.

"Sputnik."

Barnes blinked at Natasha, eyebrows scrunched together. "Rasputin?"

Natasha mirrored his confused expression, and he shrugged, explaining, "I thought we're saying random Russian things? Is that not what we're doing?"

She held back a smile. He could see it in the way her jaw twisted, because of the entertained spark in her eyes. It faded as quick as it came.

"The word 'sputnik' shuts you down. Like in the cosmodrome."

Anger—and distrust—was a knee-jerk instinct, and he didn't fight it. He glanced out his kitchen window, looking for government agents and finding none, sensing nothing off-kilter. His eyes jerked back to her.

"Then why did you say it?"

Natasha's expression went cold. "Because you think you're dangerous to us, but their words only work when a very specific combination of drugs are in your body." She paused and looked over her shoulder, out that same window. "You think I would do that?"

He opened his mouth and couldn't find a response. Yes. No. Maybe. Some days, they should. Other days, he'd kill them, if they would.

That drug thing - was a game changer. A world tilter. Huge. He was more focused on that.

"I'm gonna go," Natasha said.

He didn't want her to leave, but she was already out the door, walking toward her motorcycle. He stood in his kitchen, like an idiot, for too many long, long moments.

 _Their words only work…very specific combination of drugs_.

The body-slicing ache for  _weeks_. Collapsing inside a fiberglass boat, in the dead winter of Siberia, shaking, sweating, aching, seizing, motherfucking  _dying_. Puking into fresh, sparkling snow, the wind twisting his long, knotted hair into icicles. Hallucinating Steve. Coming down, down, down into something, something, something like clarity.

The sixteen puncture wounds in his arm, eight more in his leg. The Slovenian hotel room bleeding into focus, a person beside him on the sofa, sleeping. A singing show on the television. Car horns and birds beyond the window. Standing up, pushing his muscles past the buzz of sickeningly familiar drugs. Walking to the kitchenette, slatted wood creaking under his feet; then past the bedrooms, then to the balcony.

The smell of bread – like home. Cool air – like another place that still, still felt like home. The thin edge of a metal rail digging into the skin of his right hand,  _clanging_ against the plates of his left. The stout, red cityscape beyond. Sieving through the circles, circles, circles, grabbing bits of pieces, pieces, pieces – then, a hand around his arm, a voice saying "HYDRA," and then a gun aimed at a face – what face – who –  _don't_   _do it_  –

The same drugs still in his system, when they went to Death Valley, and when he couldn't fire his weapon, couldn't call for help, couldn't move, couldn't do anything except –  _the Winter is_  –

The front door  _banged_  open under the flat palm of Barnes' left hand, and he tore down the steps after Natasha.

"Nat!"

He sprinted right past her. She was leaning against the side of the cabin, next to the front door, her appraising eyes trained on him. As he turned and re-centered his balance, his shoes skidded atop the dirty, gravelly layer of snow. His left arm whirred, and he didn't care to control what it told her.

Steadied, he faced her. "Are you sure."

She only nodded.

He needed more than that.

Snowflakes floated through the air, icy and wet against his cheeks. Natasha brushed a flake off her nose.

His heart damn near eviscerated his chest. His neck muscles might as well have cut right through his skin.

Finally, fucking  _finally_ : "Banner and Eicher and Cho—you don't know her—are sure. You're marginally more susceptible than anyone else." She bit her cheek, uncrossed her arms. Her brow twitched. "Come home."

Stark Tower wasn't home. Natasha and Sam – and Steve, whatever was left of him –  _they_ were home.

But.

That was a giant move, and it came with expectations, consequences, demands, accountability – it came with frightening things. It came with Steve, who didn't deserve him for so many reasons.

"When you're ready," she tacked on, a flimsy addition borne of whatever he'd let show on his face.

"When Steve's ready," he said, only somewhat hedging, wholly aware that, somewhere along the way, he'd lost the person who'd once adamantly  _not_  lived to make Steve Rogers happy. "Are you still my handler?"

Yet again, her expression cooled. "Is that what you think?" she asked, bait like worms dripping out of her mouth.

He fucking  _hated_  when she did that.

"Don't do that with me. Just answer the question."

"No. I'm not. I'm your friend. I'm here as a friend."

The snow picked up: thick flakes carried by whistles of winding wind that chased the setting sun. They should go inside: drink wine, put something on the TV, and calm down back to normal.

He was fucking done with normal.

"Is that all?" he asked, baiting  _her_. "Friends?"

"I told you. Not until you remember."

A rule that hadn't held up so well in a hotel room in Kiruna, Sweden. About that: "Fuck buddies?" He lifted an eyebrow and shrugged, dismissive, like he would've done in another life.

She held his eyes, fire in hers, and didn't say a thing. She wasn't going to move.

He did.

"Natalia. Red Room. It's why I didn't shoot you in the head, or the heart. I remembered how to care, and we burned for it."

At first, she swallowed, a lump all but traveling down her throat. Her eyes searched his face, a dimming searchlight that ended with the uptick of her lips.

"I – It doesn't belong somewhere I want to forget." The ironic thing was: his memory was really, really good, and he remembered her words, verbatim, from last August. He remembered that atrocious night, ending with her hands electrifying his skin. "Let's talk."

Her hands came up to lightly rest on his shoulders, and her nose brushed his. Distracted, brain going a thousand miles a second, he didn't see it coming: how she flipped him around, pushed him against the cabin, his hands pinned to his sides, her knee very intentionally pressed against a very sensitive, wanting area.

Her nose never left his, and her breath came hot against face. "That's all you want to do? Talk?"

"Hell no," and he fucking went for it.

Later, his left arm tucked under a pillow, he traced words on her stomach, intoxicated by her bare skin. He wasn't afraid of a word like "love," and he wrote it with rolling, looping cursive in every language he knew.

He floated his fingers up her body, along her ribs, over her breasts, across the thin skin of her sternum and collarbones, until he found the rough, puckered patch of skin near her left shoulder.

She slapped his hand. "No."

He could count the millimeters of the Winter Soldier's mistake. Of his mistake. He could pull dozens of memories of telling his trainees about the best, most-certain way to kill someone: not with a bullet to the head but with a bullet as near the heart as possible. Lungs, arteries, valves, aortas – the nerve center had nothing on oxygen and blood flow.

Millimeters.

"I mean it," Natasha warned. "Not me."

 _I'm sorry_  sat on the tip of his tongue. If he said it, she'd sit up, and he didn't want that. He wanted to keep touching.

"Okay," he said and moved on.

He wrote "home" across her chest, with the same looping writing, in all the languages he knew.

Дома. Dom. Acasă. Додому. Kodu. Maison. სახლში. Zuhause. Casa. Главная.

He wrote and he wondered and he let himself have a bit of a dream for a bit of a moment.

***

Steve trots down sparkly gray granite steps, his hand hovering over the smooth black hand rail by habit. On his left, bulletproof windows stretch from floor to ceiling, showcasing the autumnal, crisp beauty of upstate New York.

Better yet: good news from the Tabernas Desert. No fatalities, and, though wounded, Natasha is fine. That's a good day. A stressful, powerless sixteen-hour day trapped in a dark Ops center – but a good one.

Positivity counts, Sam always says.

Steve sees Three and Seven approach for landing, Seven taking priority while Three circles. Good timing.

See? Positivity.

The windows end at ground level. He doesn't see Iron Man blast out of the back of Three, diving toward the rooftop helicopter pad.

Steve looks up at the optic scanner for access to the subterranean jet hangar. The glossy red door slides open for him, and he makes his way to the flight deck.

Seven is lowering down, its landing skids locked onto the elevator platform. Hydraulics  _hisssss_  as the platform pivots, aligning the cargo door with the flight deck.

While Three lowers down, Steve waits for Natasha – and whoever was so important that Sam couldn't announce their name over the comms.

The black body bag rolls out of Seven first. Natasha walks behind it, her left arm suspended in a black sling, her hair turned gray-white with ash, and her face mime-like with soot. A med team trails her with an oxygen mask and impatient, concerned looks.

Three pivots and aligns. The cargo door opens immediately. Sam and Rhodes damn near run down the deck, both sets of their eyes firmly on Steve. That's a little weird.

On a positive note, Natasha is alive. On a non-positive note, Steve instantly cues in that she's not doing – not at all.

He steps toward her, avoiding the body bag's gurney, and squeezes her arm. "Hey, what's going on?"

Natasha stares past him, watching the gurney disappear toward the elevator bank. Her once-was black t-shirt is wet with fresh blood, but the med team keeps a strange distance.

Steve's hand drops, and he turns towards Sam and Rhodes.

"Where's Tony?"

Usually the straight-shooter, Rhodes replies with too many details and a nonlinear explanation. "He went to see Hill. It's a medical research laboratory. We'll need a lot more resources to get through it all."

It's a bad lie. Rhodes is the one who coordinates resources with Maria. Tony pays the bills, throws tech at them, and makes a nuisance of himself at random times.

Steve raises his chin and then decides to nod, to play along. "That sounds important."

Sam is a sick shade of gray; his stare, a thousand miles away. A lot like Natasha.

They wanted to keep the identity of the person inside the body bag off the comm. Tony rushed to talk to Maria in person. Natasha and Sam are both devastated.

Steve counts the team: Rhodes, Sam, Natasha. Maria, Bruce, and Tony are inside. That's everyone.

Steve cycles through the others: Clint, Thor, Fury. Steve doesn't think Sam's ever met Clint or Thor, and Sam was never something Steve would call "close" to Fury.

It's Sharon or Bucky.

It can't be either one. It can't be.

Steve looks to Sam. "Which one?"

He asks the question, but he thinks, again and again, that it can't be either one of them – until he finally  _sees_  Sam. He sees the stress lines, blood-sucked skin, downturned lips—and, most of all, a defeat that burdens the bones of his body and turns Sam's face into that of a stranger's.

Sam never really knew Sharon, not like that.

"No." Steve's voice echoes, a thick glob far, far above him. "No."

"I'm sorry, Steve."

Air vaporizes. His lungs seize with the gut-punch. His heart is a stone skipping over water—skip, skip, skip, skip—before it runs out of skips and sinks, sinks, sinks, down, down, down.

Seven years ago, centimeters away and useless, Steve let Bucky fall. The world had fallen with him.

Steve brushes Rhodes' sudden hands away, then shoves Rhodes' entire body away. Words are said but he doesn't hear anything but a dull sound.

The world is that bag.

Bucky's in that bag.

How.

Sam's voice smashes through Steve's meaningless thoughts. "Steve, are you  _okay_?"

Steve looks to Sam. "How."

Sam doesn't hesitate. "He shot himself in the head."

Not very long ago, Steve told Natasha that he worried Bucky would "eat a gun." He'd heard the phrase in a movie maybe, and it'd stuck in his head. It was a good turn of phrase – explicit, dramatic, got the point across in only three words.

Natasha had dismissed the entire concept. "No, he wouldn't do it like that."

"'Like that,'" Steve repeated, dumbfounded when he really shouldn't have been. He'd read the file, and a bullet to the head, surprisingly, had  _not_  been in the list of suicide attempts. Then he'd realized, disgusted: he was mulling over how Bucky— _Bucky_ —would kill himself. "Nevermind. I'm done with this."

Bucky.

He's in that bag.

 _How_  is the wrong question but the only one that makes sense. His brain stuck on that single word— _how, how, how, how_ —Steve asks it again. "How?"

 _How_.

Steve doesn't notice how seamlessly Sam understands the same word twice baked. "It looks like he'd been there for a little while. Let's go upstairs and talk more. Okay?"

 _How_.

The person Steve used to be would have focused more on how Sam and Natasha were doing. He would have remembered to recognize that Sam and Bucky had been friends and that Natasha and Bucky had been something more.

Seven years ago, he'd grieved in his own solitude last and supported his team in their grief first. He hadn't fooled them, but it hadn't mattered. It'd been his job and a core, critical part of his person to get the job done. He still doesn't know where HYDRA has put that person. It's a damn good hiding place, is all.

The world is in that bag. Bucky is in that bag.

"I need to see him," Steve says.

When Sam blinks, his eyes stay closed long enough that Steve doesn't know if they're ever going to open again.

"Okay," Sam says.

***

Natasha goes to Medical on Floor Four, and Sam walks with Steve to Subfloor Four, to the shiniest morgue he's ever seen in his entire life.

Subfloor Four also houses SHIELD archives: old shit no one wants anymore, next to all the dead people. There's a sense to it.

The morgue is a single, large room beyond an optic-sensor door. Steve fixates on the narrow, horizontal window, his stare a few feet beyond the glass pane. Sam glances in and sees why: the bag and the gurney are sitting right there, with a tech using a black Sharpie to prepare a toe tag.

Sam looks up at the optic sensor and wills the damn door to open, before Steve decides to knock it off its frame. Within a second, the door  _clicks_ , and Steve barrels through it. His hand dents the metal.

The stupid, naïve, clueless tech looks up. He's got the Sharpie cap lodged in the corner of his mouth. "I'm sorry, Captain, you can't be in here."

Preemptively, Sam steps between Steve and the tech. Steve's gotten a lot better about blacking out and knocking shit around, but, today? Sam expects it.

The tech sighs. "Look, I get it, but neither of—"

"Can't you give him a few minutes?" Sam levels with the guy. "It's his best friend."

Sam holds his breath, simultaneously waiting for the tech to  _God damn say yes; please God damn say yes_  and Steve to give Bruce a run for his money in the smash department.

Finally, the tech nods. "Just…don't touch the body. We still need to collect forensic evidence."

As the tech walks to an office, Sam wonders what the guy is smoking. Forensic evidence is used for criminal investigations and justice. That's not going to happen here.

Also:  _the body_. The truth of it settles: Barnes is dead.

Not  _gone_. Not  _with God_. Not  _peacefully resting_. As a counselor, Sam knows better than to use euphemisms as emotional crutches. The only acceptable word is  _dead_.

Barnes is  _dead._

Steve unzips the bag.

Sam doesn't look. He's already seen the gunshot wound; the bruising and lacerations; the pale, thin skin; the clenched left fist; and the IV hook-up. He's seen it all.

He hears the  _crinkle_  of the plastic, and then, even while Sam's waiting for it, a heavy, sharp inhalation.

Grief isn't so much visible as it is tangible. It supersaturates the air, until it's hard to breathe, hard to walk, hard to do anything. Right now, Sam could reach out and take a handful of Steve's grief, playdough in his hands—but he's not a counselor today. Not today, or for a while.

"They used to use cotton mattress covers," Steve comments, a drive-by  _non-sequitur_  if there ever was one. "Ponchos, sometimes. Curtains. This is nice."

Sam has nothing to say to that, though his brain latches on to the thought. Body bags are also called  _cadaver pouches_  and, best of all,  _human remains pouches_ , so, when you die, you get at least one shitty word wrapped around you.

Sam looks in Steve's direction for long enough to see Steve's shaking hand touch the face. He watches Steve's fingers root around the jawline, up toward the ear, undoubtedly looking for the seam of a mask.

Steve accepts that the body is Barnes, sags a good two inches, and plants his fingers in Barnes' fucking amazing, nice hair.

Sam'd never seen someone—anyone—care so much about their hair, until Barnes slinked onto the scene with bottles of hair product and hours to spare. In 2016, after they'd brought back Steve and fixed up Barnes, Sam had even given him a pile of shit about it.

Barnes had revealed, "They wouldn't let me touch it. Identity."

Since Barnes wasn't a client, Sam could say, "So you spend  _hours_  petting yourself with hair product, because HYDRA wouldn't give you a comb?"

 _Too far_ , Sam'd thought.  _Too dismissive._

"Yeah," Barnes answered, without an ounce of shame, and, without an ounce of shame, made a jack-off motion with his left hand. "And my left hand feels fucking a-ma-zing petting my dick."

Barnes wasn't fragile.

There's a hole in his head today.

Grief lights up muscles and veins as good as a decent line of cocaine, without the euphoria. It strangles the chest wall into crushing waves of aches. It makes legs and arms thrum with too much blood, the body forgetting where to put it. The stomach warps worse than a cheap piece of sodden plywood. Grief is  _real_.

"At least we know for sure."

Steve's voice is a hollow echo in this room made of tile floor, metal walls, and a concrete ceiling. Everything in this room is hard and unforgiving.

"Yeah" is all Sam's got, because he's got no idea what Steve means.

A restless silence shivers between them, a live wire a thin cord from snapping. Sam's eyes dart from the metal drawers, to the smooth floor, to the too-low ceiling, to his own hands – anywhere but Steve and Barnes. Anywhere but there.

He can't stand being here.

Steve breaks the pounding silence.

"He moved to Brooklyn from Indiana when he was six. Didn't know anybody. Didn't talk right. Didn't know how to act. At school, he sat with me at lunch – just us two. We played together, went to each other's houses. After about two weeks, everybody wanted to be his friend. He was that kind of person, even at that age."

"Magnetic," Sam fills in. He knows it, believes it.

"I thought that was the end of that. He'd move on. Then he punched Walt Murray in the face and asked if I wanted to go fishing with his dad."

Sam doesn't know what to say. Undoubtedly, Steve has a hundred more stories about the person a good, dead man fought like hell to reclaim.

"What they've done to him." Steve's tone is steeped in bitter, loathing enmity. It's dangerous, for so many reasons.

Sam's heart skips. His face is hot; palms, damp. Stomach flipping and flopping, he makes it to the other side of Steve, to the other side of the gurney and the  _pouch_ , and tries not to look down.

He tries to look at Steve, but Steve  _is_ looking down.

"The last thing he'd want is for you to go down that road. Feel what you have to, but don't,  _don't_  do anything."

Steve's eyes flick up. "He didn't deserve  _any_ of this. He—"

"He deserved more," Sam affirms.

Steve's eyes close, and his head hangs lower.

Despite himself, Sam looks down at the body.

The skin's paler and bluer; the bruises, darker, more brutal. The face is almost 2014 thin: all sharp angles and hollow shadows. His left hand is still that locked fist. That IV is still taped to the right hand.

Sam understands the hatred.

Steve's eyes never leave the body. "We had him." His fingers curl over the right hand; Sam looks away. "I had you."

That last night in Brazil, they'd argued over six loaded words:  _it all could have been different_.

Once and again.

***

"You know that we autopsied him."

People die. People  _die_. James isn't special.

Natasha nods.

"There is evidence of traumatic brain injury, inflicted prior to the bullet. Multiple strokes. His bloodwork came back positive for sedatives and anti-convulsants; he was likely suffering from seizures."

"Curable?" Natasha asks.

Eicher shakes her head. "Treatable – but, no, not curable. The damage was irrevocable. In an average human, likely vegetative."

What Eicher is saying is that he wasn't the same person when she'd found him, and he wouldn't have ever been the same person again, even if she'd found him sooner - not even considering all the likely stolen memories. Natasha's almost surprised HYDRA kept him alive.

"How long?"

Eicher leans against a clean autopsy table, crosses her arms, and doesn't look directly at Natasha. "Months."

Ice runs down Natasha's back. There's only one way to interpret that.

Three sublevels and two floors above the morgue, Natasha chooses not to sit in Maria's office. She stands inside, leaving enough room to shut the oak door.

Maria locks her gaze distantly out the window. "We're investigating the unit."

"Her," Natasha clarifies. It was a two-person unit: one of them is dead, and the other has been lying for five months. "You're investigating her."

Had that text message even come from him? Natasha's gut tells her  _no_. It'd been a decoy to explain the lack of contact. She should have known better. Should have flown to Berlin and knocked down his door. Should have.

Maria shuts her eyes, stands up straighter, and turns a hard look Natasha's way. "Need to know. You know how this works."

Natasha doesn't provide any sort of answer. This mess has layers, one of them being that she'd put James on a train to Brussels with a connection to Berlin, delivering him to someone she'd somehow thought they could trust again.

James had trusted her to have his back.

"I ask that you keep any information you have from Captain Rogers." So formal. So procedural. "It would be dangerous to compromise the stability he still has. Are you agreeable to that?"

Agreeable to lying to a close friend – close enough to be considered family, whatever family is. Agreeable to playing with his head, to betraying him again with lies and secrets, to taking from him not only a person Steve considered a brother but the truth about that person's death –  _again_. Agreeable to pretending someone he cares deeply about is safe and not brainwashed.

"Yes," she says and knows she doesn't mean it. After all, she has to lie to someone.

Once, the mission came first and only. People and their feelings hadn't mattered. More and more, she thinks she's been in the wrong business for a lot of years.

"I'm genuinely sorry about Barnes," Maria offers. "If we'd known…"

Practical. Superficial. Natasha won't be the same.

***

Steve glances up at the optic reader and pushes at the door to the morgue. It doesn't open.

A female voice tells him "access restricted."

Steve forces the door open, breaking the hinges and denting the steel, then strides inside. Immediately, a shrill alarm sounds. Steve ignores it and heads left, toward a wall of stainless steel drawers.

Bucky's inside one of them.

Eicher's voice echoes through the cold, clinical room. "JARVIS, cancel the alarm."

JARVIS immediately complies. The alarm silences.

"Captain—"

Steve doesn't want her pity, her judgment, her advice, or  _her_. He stops inches from the wall and runs his eyes up and down the 4x4 block of options. He'll open them all, if he has to. "Which one?"

Eicher walks from the examiner's office across the room to him. Without hesitation, she unlatches the third drawer in from the left, second from the bottom, and then slides it out.

A thick white sheet covers a long body from head to toe. The body doesn't move. Lightheaded and a step removed from himself, Steve puts his hand atop the sheet, where he thinks Bucky's hand is – and finds a cold, stiff, frozen lump of flesh.

 _Buck_.

A stinging prickle runs up his sinuses.

"The autopsy's done?" Steve assumes, somewhere between a question, a statement, and a lament.

It means the body has been cut and splayed open from clavicle to pelvic bone. It means the organs have been removed, weighed, documented, and slid back inside a hollow, dead husk of skin. It means the facial skin has been peeled away, the skull cut open, the brain removed and studied, and all of it stitched back together. It means he's dead.

It means…

Eicher crosses her arms. "Yes. The autopsy has been completed."

Stingers dive into his eyes, but the rest of him feels vacant. "Can you go?"

"Captain. We'll take good care of him. He's safe here. You—"

That's exactly what Natasha had said five months ago: he's safe, he's taken care of. Here he is.

"Can you go?" he repeats, as if he hadn't asked the first time. But he had, and he begs, "Please, Alicia."

Eicher doesn't step away from the drawer. "I don't want you to be surprised by what you see."

He's seen incisions and sutures before. He's seen death. He's seen bodies, piles of them, fields of them.

"He was physically tortured. There are scars."

Noted. Even as he tries to look through the sheet. "Can you go?" he repeats, tone resembling pitted, brittle steel.

Finally, Eicher gives him a small nod. "It's not him."

He only hears those three words. His brain hears them, a record scratching to a halt on the turntable. His heart hears them, disintegrating as every bit of grief piles up into a brick wall that it hits mid-beat. "What."

"This is only a body. It's not him."

She means for it to help. He hates her for it.

His lips twitch uncontrollably. His sinuses liquefy. More of those stingers threaten to drown his eyes.

Eicher brings him a stool and then leaves through the broken door.

Steve folds back the sheet, past the bullet hole in the forehead, past the deeply shadowed eyes, past the wan purple-green bruising swathed across the neck, to the tips of the vector-like autopsy incisions that stretch from his clavicles to sternum and then down under the sheet.

He sits on the stool and takes the thickly scarred, cold hand into his own, thumb rubbing those tight, contractured scars.

Bucky was left-hand dominant but could shoot with both hands. There's no explanation in the world for HYDRA to essentially cripple his right hand.

 _We had you_.  _You were safe_.

Steve folds down another few inches of the sheet, revealing shoulders, more of the unending incision, and the top of the chest.

Blood really can run cold.

Viciously stunned, Steve bunches the sheet down to the hips. Eyes wide, he forgets to breathe.

It's white phosphorus. It's HYDRA's symbol. It's a raised, permanent, healed scar, from his chest to his belly button.

" _It burned. It hurt for days, and, when it stopped, he did it again_. _"_

Mottled spots from broken blood vessels shade that scar red –  _"I always liked boxing, Steve. See? You're better than a punching bag."_

Hypertrophic, jagged scars slather his arm – the same kind that Steve has on his arms from the hundred cuts of a serrated knife.

He swallows rising bile, puts his face in his hands, and breathes deeply, willing his body to  _settle_.

They did it to Bucky. To  _Bucky_.

Steve pulls the sheet back up to the collarbone. For the rest, he has a map of where to look for the damage.

He finds more than he ever, ever expected.

He finds the drill marks and the gunshot wounds to the thighs. Steve has those, too.

He finds both knees have been shot and healed into deep bands of scar tissue. Steve doesn't have that.

They'd taken him, so they could do this. They hadn't wanted him for his serum, or his knowledge, or his abilities. They hadn't wanted the Winter Soldier. They'd only wanted to hurt him, and they had.

 _We had you_.

Steve takes his hand again. "You're safe, you're home, you're here."

_You're dead._

***

A paper banner made of smiling orange Jack-o-Lanterns hangs in soft, loose dips across both hallway walls on Six. A cut-out of a flying witch floats in the center of the threshold into the Cafeteria, while a bowl of individually-wrapped chocolate candy has recently been set inside the doorway.

Happy fucking Halloween.

Face resting in his open hand, Sam swirls mashed potatoes on his plate. He hasn't had an appetite for at least a day now. Hasn't slept. Hasn't done anything except stare and remind himself that – yeah.

They finally got him here.

Natasha sits down across from him, a shiny red apple in her free hand. Her other is occupied by a black arm sling. She puts the apple on the table, sits back, and doesn't say a word.

That's okay. Sam has words. "We going to bury him?"

"I don't know."

Stronger, Sam insists. "We should bury him."

"We should do a lot of things. Have you seen Steve?"

Sam could laugh. Steve needs help, now more than ever, and he won't get it. "The morgue, probably. He broke the door to get in this morning. We're burying him, Nat."

As quickly as she came, Natasha gets up and leaves.

Sam drops his fork, plops his arms on the table, and hides his face on top of them.

***

The only truly quiet place in the new headquarters is on the roof. No one else seems to have discovered it yet.

Steve sits at the south edge, furthest from the Quinjet landing pads. His legs dangle off the limestone ledge, far above the concrete sidewalk and grassy expanse that leads to miles of forest.

Bucky would've liked this place. He might've even stayed.

 _I had you_.

Steve buries his face in his hands, eases into the darkness, and tries not to think about that last day in Brazil. Of course, he fails.

Bucky had only been free from HYDRA for three years, and Steve had burdened him with  _everything_  – every bad thought, every bit of blame, every crummy question, everything HYDRA had done to him. If he hadn't pushed so hard, Bucky might've come home. He'd be alive.

Steve presses his palms into his eye sockets until he sees colorful splotches.

The metal access door  _slams_.

Steve drops his hands and blinks away the colors. He inhales deeply, clearing out his system with cold fresh air, and locks his eyes on a tall, thick mass of gray clouds.

"Hey, Steve." Natasha, all superficial smooth. "How you doing?"

He huffs out a pitiful laugh. It's been thirty-eight hours. "Really?"

"Just a question," she replies, evidently back to her ever-cool self. She sits next to him, almost touching. "Heard you broke a door today."

He spares her a glance—the tiredness in her face and the dullness in her eyes betrays how cool she wants to sound—and then looks back out toward the horizon. "What do you want?"

Natasha slips her arm out of its sling and pulls her hands into her lap, wincing. "A shoulder. Like old times."

 _The old times_ were less than four years ago, and she'd been his shoulder to lean on. He'd never been hers. Wrong on all counts.

"I think you're on the wrong rooftop."

He feels her eyes bore into him, but he holds steady. He stays calm, using Bucky's one-two-three-calm, one-two-three-relax, one-two-three-calm.

"Just say it, Rogers." She sounds impatient.

_One-two-three._

He's got nothing to say. "You tell me."

_One-two-three._

"Tell you  _what_?"

He whips his head around, anger blackening the edges of his vision. He barely keeps it verbal-only, barely keeps himself from yelling, and barely keeps his ass planted. "How the hell that happened!"

Natasha doesn't recoil. She holds his eyes with hers. And says  _nothing_.

"SHIELD is eighty people." Give or take. "How do you lose one and not know?"

He knows how. He god damn knows. So does she. So do all of them.

He saw the body – the marks, the bruises, the blood, and the horrific, purposeful scars. HYDRA had Bucky for  _months_ , when it's only been five since Brazil.

"Maria is investigating James' unit."

" _Investigating_? Jesus Christ, Natasha—" She's not stupid. She doesn't need him to say it, but he does anyway. "SHIELD handed him right to HYDRA."

And somehow—god damn somehow—covered it up.

"That's a very serious accusation" is all she says, flatly.

 _A very serious accusation_. He gapes at her, astounded. "Bucky's dead. He's  _dead_."

"Steve."

Even after all of it – after Insight, after 2016, after Brazil, after being there when Bucky took his life – Natasha is still a SHIELD loyalist, through and through. It sickens him.  _She_ sickens him.

Legs weak, he gets up and prepares to stalk away, before he can't control what he does. "You – He trusted you."

 _And look where it got him_.

"We thought we got them all. We were wrong." Through pursed lips, she takes a shuddering breath. " _I_ handed him to HYDRA."

Out at the cusp of the horizon, the sun is setting behind a pitch of dark clouds. It isn't a vibrant orange or illustrious yellow sunset this evening; it's a dull gray and carries the threat of a storm.

"From Brazil, he flew to Copenhagen. He let me find him – in a café. He wanted to work for SHIELD." Natasha pauses and bites the inside of her cheek. Her freebie tell. "We were ready for that. I gave him a train ticket to Brussels, with instructions to proceed to Berlin. It was supposed to be easy work – nothing dangerous, nothing heavy. We trusted the agent we assigned to him. Maria is investigating that agent. But we know. We know."

Steve believes her. He believes all of it.

He sits back down. The sun collapses behind the clouds.

"It's not your fault."

Her answer is quick. "I know. I wish—" She stops and doesn't finish.

Steve might get it. "After he fell, I wish I'd tried harder. Listened to the people around me." His gut twists, even after all this time and everything— _everything—_ else that's happened. "I could've changed it all."

"Something like that," Natasha agrees.

A morbid thought crosses his mind, one he nearly laughs about. "How many times can you grieve for the same person?"

"Six," Natasha replies.

He almost misses it.

_Six._

***

"How many times can you grieve for the same person?" Steve wonders.

Natasha's number is six: after the Red Room, after defecting to SHIELD, after Odessa, after Insight, after Death Valley, and now. She only tells Steve that number: six.

James is dead, and their secret no longer matters.

People die every day.

"Six" jolts Steve out of his grief. Natasha doesn't have to look at him to know he's trying to count her ways and coming up very, very short.

Natasha lets Steve's silence dominate the space between them, while she stares into the sunsetting darkness of the wilderness beyond them. Dark gray clouds litter the moonless, starless sky; the only light comes from the ambiance of the dim security lights twelve stories below.

"What." It's not asked like a question, or even said like a statement. It's a word left dangling.

"He valued himself more than he valued his life," Natasha deflects. It's true. "I don't think he'd want us to grieve."

"How six."

Natasha can't look at Steve. She counts back to 2014 and thinks of all the ways she could have changed the trajectory of each of their lives. Of the different kind of help she could have given but didn't. Of everything she'd known but withheld.

Like now, still. To protect Steve from the hurtful truth.

As she speaks, her throat dries, lungs deflate, and somehow, eyes sting. "They called it the Red Room. He trained me. Even how he was then, he was the one good thing in my life."

Natasha finally looks at Steve, those tears in her eyes, fear palpable on her face, even things their friendship had never shown, laid bare.

Steve, on the other hand, seems more introspective than upset. After a long stretch of time, he reflects, "During those first few months working with you, you fought like him. The way you'd look at me was the same way he would. Still is. I thought I was nuts, but now. Now, I guess I was just real observant."

"I wish I'd known," Steve adds, an afterthought, "about you two."

Natasha schools her face and turns it away. She wonders if Steve realizes what he said: that his Bucky was her James, the difference between them null.

After many long minutes, she says, "We should talk more."

"Yeah. That'd be helpful."

A handful of words creep up her throat, chased by nervous vapors emanating from her lungs.

Somewhere around three and a half years ago, she'd realized that SHIELD didn't so much matter anymore. Without SHIELD, they were still the same people, and all they had was each other.

All they have  _is_ each other, and she won't sacrifice that for a secret, or an easier way through this.

"The agent assigned to James was Sharon."

Steve's hands crunch clean through two new limestone blocks, chips and chunks careening to the ground.

***

Sam doesn't have to force his way through the door to Steve's apartment. Not when Steve crashes his way in, bending reinforced hinges from the doubly reinforced frame before JARVIS can unlock the door.

Likewise, Sam doesn't have the time to gape at the intentionally dark surroundings. He barely has time to dodge the sofa he can barely see, and he doesn't have time to avoid bashing his bad knee into the coffee table.

" _Fuck,_ " Sam hisses. "JARVIS, l—"

"No lights!" Steve snaps, even as he stalks into his bedroom and starts banging around. "Get out, Sam."

Natasha's in the hallway. Tony's hopefully on his way, armor and all. That's the only reason Sam plants his feet outside Steve's bedroom door, fear pounding his heart raw.

That's the only reason he says, "No, Steve. I won't. Stop."

In the near-pitch dark of the room, Sam  _thinks_ Steve's got a duffel bag on the bed, and Sam  _thinks_ Steve is hastily stuffing it with clothes from a dresser.

Steve's tone turns from raging hot to slippery cold in a second flat. " _Go_."

"Steve—"

"It's too fucking late for him!" Steve shouts, back to raging hot, winding around his Hotwheels track. Only the shine of the whites of his wide eyes is visible in the dark. Sam sinks his fingers into the door jamb. "But it's not for her. I'm going. I'm finding her. I'm ending this."

"Steve, SHIELD wil—"

Back to slippery cold. "Fuck SHIELD."

The zipper of the bag rips shut, followed by a heavy huff and an ominous, sudden quietude.

"Where's my shield?"

Sam's about to say it's in the gear-up room down near the hangar bay, but it's not. It never made it to the Tower, even. October 2016 through June 2017 had been nothing but panicked, exhausting, understaffed turmoil. June 2017 through now had passed too quickly, still understaffed, especially with the transition out of the Tower and into the new headquarters.

A pang of shame stabs at him: they'd forgotten all about it, which in itself means that not one of them ever thought—or thinks—Steve will ever again be Captain America.

Duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, Steve steps into Sam's space, his shadowed, dark stature sending Sam's heart off again. "Where's my shield, Sam?"

Natasha's right out there. She's got his back. And she's quick, so when Steve flips out, she'll be here.

Sam swallows a lake of saliva and meets Steve's eyes. "Stuck in a tree somewhere in northern Italy. B threw it up there in August last year."

Only last year.  _Fuck_. It feels like longer.

Steve's jaw slackens. His hand kneads the strap of his bag. "What."

Sam lifts a hand and then drops it: shaking his head, shrugging, still ashamed that they'd never sent one fucking jet out there to get it. They could've spared one for a couple hours. Or Tony could've taken a joyride.

"He didn't say why. But – it would have drawn attention." It had in 2014, when he and Steve had crisscrossed Europe on a fool's errand. "I figured that's why."

Steve sounds perplexed and frustrated more than out-of-control and irate. "Where."

"I don't know. Somewhere near Gran Zebrù."

The whites of Steve's eyes roll – but not in a funny, ha-ha, long-suffering way. "You only had a year. Move."

Sam moves, in lieu of getting punched, backhanded, or shoved into an unsuspecting wall.

In the bright hallway, Natasha stands ready and waiting: leaning against the wall, arms crossed (and that  _has_ to hurt), one foot pressed flat against the smooth oak. Sam tries not to put his relief on display. She can shut this down, can reason with Steve like no one else.

Steve sees her and stops. "Don't e—"

"It's only ten miles from the base we found. I logged the base coordinates in the AAR."

Steve's shoulders relax a millimeter. His knuckles turn from paper white to eggshell white. Progress.

Sam expects her to say that they'll finally send a team to go get it. She expects her to wind Steve down, talk some sense, do something magical.

Not: "We go. Get your shield. And find her."

It's Sam's turn to drop his jaw. He looks to Natasha from behind Steve and knows he's showing her his gut-punched, probably-pissed expression.

She looks directly at Sam. "You saw what they did to him." Then to Steve. "I'll get a jet."

"No. No jet. No SHIELD. I mean it."

Great: Steve sounds exactly like himself from 2014, and then again from 2015. Only, it's 2017, and he's  _unstable_ , and this half-assed plan is entirely  _insane_.

Sam steps around Steve, blocks the path to the nearest stairwell, then turns and regards both of them. "He wouldn't want this. You fucking know it."

The calm presence Steve exudes is  _unnerving_  and as natural as standing in the eye of a vicious, swirling storm. "He's dead. Sharon's not. I'm not asking you to come."

 _No, this is how you choose to not grieve_ , Sam thinks but doesn't dare say – not yet.

Between both of them, he won't win. Somehow, "give me twenty minutes to pack" comes out of his mouth.

_God damn it._

***

It's only over 4,000 miles to Italy. Only more than eleven hours for the flight from JFK to Orio al Serio near Milan – which is  _another_ 200 miles from the Italian backcountry near Sulden.

Sam stretches, visualizing his spine expanding upward, and pulls his shoulders back as he cranes his neck forward. Something in his back satisfyingly  _pops_. He extends his bad knee out, a tennis-shoed foot intruding on the aisle. Most of everyone's asleep; no one's going to mind.

Next to him, Natasha stares at an easy game of solitaire on her tablet. She hasn't made a move in fifteen minutes. Guilt tripping about Copenhagen takes a lot out of someone, and Sam counts her as another friend lost to this never-ending mess.

Next to her, head propped against the fuselage, Steve's distant gaze drifts somewhere in the vapors of the dim, starless gray-cloud sky. He's got AirPods in but doubtfully anything playing through them.

Years ago, they'd sat together in similar seats, on a similar flight, and Steve had talked about how Bucky hated him. So fucking wrong, but maybe better if Steve'd been right, if Barnes had hated Steve and died doing it.

 _All you had to do was stay. It'd all be different._  Sam thinks it at a dead person. Dead people don't care.

Sam thinks  _I hate you_  at that dead person and could shrivel up and die for it.  _I don't. I'm sorry_.

Dead people don't listen, either. And probably don't mind read.

He spends time trying to convince himself that they're doing this for Sharon. That it wouldn't be far more effective and efficient to use all of SHIELD's resources to find and help her, rather than running off half-cocked, like they had in 2014 and again in 2016. That this isn't Steve and Natasha taking the Avengers moniker too literally.

"We had him, Sam."

Steve says it, but Natasha finally taps the Ace of Clubs up and pulls the King of Spades over. Her face flushes – and Sam wonders how that last conversation in Copenhagen had gone, if there'd been any room to talk Barnes down, and what might've happened if she'd dragged his diva ass to one of his nice hotels for a couple nights.

It's not her fault.

But.

Sam looks past Natasha to Steve. "Yeah. I know."

When they land, it's a cool 50 Fahrenheit. Sam shrugs on a jacket, shoulders his light backpack, and leads the way to the vehicle rental counter. Whether Steve likes it or not, SHIELD pays for a red 2017 Volkswagen Polo.

Natasha drives, Steve sitting shotgun. Sam sits in the back and watches Bergamo's cityscapes blur into empty, beige farmland.

No one talks.

Electrical towers sprout through the fields. When he was a kid, he'd pretended they were robots. Transformers or old school Cylons or something cool like that.

Cars and semi-trucks whizz by, as Natasha tails a black BMW. Red-rimmed circle signs announce that Natasha is speeding far faster than the 40 km/h limit. The minute the highway expands into a median-divided, two-lane expressway, she passes, eyes calmly focused on the long journey ahead.

Blue signs written in Italian announce ignored attractions and nearby towns.

Shadowed mountains loom in the far, overcast horizon, while the empty fields become barren, stripped vineyards.

_Don't sacrifice yourself for us. Don't burn._

_Too late, man_ , Sam thinks, as his blinks stretch into a doze, then into a nap.

It's a light enough sleep that he knows when they ease into the mountains, by the way the car swings and dips and bounces. He cracks an eye and sees tall, jagged mountains covered in autumnal hues, a hand's stretch away. If he pretends, they could be in Appalachia, at the corner of Pennsylvania and Maryland.

He thinks they have another two and a half hours to go, at the least.

Still, no talking. No radio. This is more of a funeral procession than a rescue mission, and he wonders if either of them realize it.

Natasha's phone rings, and she silences it after a glance at the caller ID. Sam's phone goes off next; it's Maria. He thinks about answering it but swipes her. Steve's next, and he doesn't even bother reaching for his phone. He lets it ring through.

They rip through a dark tunnel, then pass through Trento, where he, Natasha, and Barnes had stayed for a night. They'd caught a train to Germany the next morning.

" _I'm afraid of what I don't know."_

" _Did you know that Rachael Ray sucks?"_

_Sam got away with the comment, or so he thought, until he heard the tell-tale shifting of Barnes' left arm._

" _Don't you shift your fucking plates at me, man."_

" _Watch yourself."_

He's dead, Sam realizes. He's not coming back. And they're circling the sun, waiting to melt.

"Where to after this?" Sam asks. He means,  _What's the plan?_

Natasha is quick to pull herself out of her own thoughts. "Berlin. They had a few safe houses. We'll go from there."

Hardly a plan.

Sam closes his eyes again and sleeps, until they slow down at the outskirts of the out-of-season ski resort town of Sulden. Exactly as he remembers it, troves of pines surround them on either side; directly ahead, picturesque, snow-capped mountains cut a jagged edge through the deep blue sky.

Natasha pulls into the lot of a small, locally-owned hotel, cuts the engine, and drops her hands into her lap.

Steve pops his door open.

A year ago, they'd stolen a car here and driven straight to Trento. Back then, Sam'd wondered if they'd ever find Steve. Although he doesn't want to be here, thinks it's the stupidest idea any of them have had in at least six months, he takes a single moment to appreciate: Steve's here.

Steve, who's already standing outside of the car. Steve, who already has a SHIELD-issued handheld GPS powered up. Steve, who's already using his thumbs to input the base coordinates. Steve, who says, "We get a room, and we go."

Natasha and Sam get out of the car. Sam would say that he expects Natasha to be on his side, on his same page, but that's not so much been happening lately. For all he knows, she'll nod and say that's the second greatest stupid idea she's willing to agree to all week.

"Steve," she says, "we have four hours of sunlight left. We eat, rest, and go first thing."

Eyes hard, Steve glances up from the GPS. "You can stay. I'm going."

"It's enemy territory," Sam adds, finally feeling as if he's not throwing himself against a brick wall by merely speaking. "We don't have weapons."

"Better find the shield, then."

Sam's ready to mutter a capitulatory "fuck," when Natasha finally stands ground.

"Steve. We stay. We go first thing. I'm not asking."

Steve rounds the front of the car, accidentally kicks the cement stopper a few feet toward the hotel building, and saddles up real, real close to Natasha: face to face, height difference notwithstanding.

"You had  _a year_ ," Steve spits, that slippery cold thing mixing with that raging hot thing. "What, thought I'd never ask? Need it again?"

Natasha's ice cold, baiting. "What's another couple hours. Knock it off, Rogers."

Steve searches her eyes, while she searches his, neither of them budging for several, tension-filled seconds. Finally, Steve pushes the GPS unit at her and stalks off toward the hotel's lobby.

Natasha bites at her cheek and chances a glance at Sam. "Thanks for being here. I know you'd rather not be."

Sam could laugh at that. He takes the more adult route. "You know this is a mistake. Not going after Sharon – but doing it this way."

"Steve would have disappeared and come on his own. He's not alone this way."

That stops the churning bitterness and alleviates some of his anger. It's a fair point that Sam concedes with an easy nod.

She veers in another direction. "You blame me."

Automatically, Sam shakes his head and says, "No." And it's true. "He was gonna do what he was gonna do, like always. You put him somewhere you thought was safe."

They could drown in maybe's and what-if's. It won't bring him back. It won't save Sharon. It won't salve Steve.

Natasha nods acceptance of that, while her eyes tell him that she doesn't believe a word of it.

In time.

***

In 1943's Italy, a week, maybe two after Krausberg, the dark circles under Bucky's eyes had mostly faded back into pale, healthy skin. He was thinner than Steve'd ever seen him, not really a problem that their meager Charlie-rats could solve.

Steve didn't miss the frequent far-away stare. The furtive, heated conversations with Dugan. The startles and flinches, worse at night. Steve didn't know what it was, and so he thought of it simply as: the War getting to Bucky. And Steve knew: being here with him, bringing a familiar piece of home, would make the difference.

Back then, it hadn't seemed naïve.

On that particular day back then, Bucky'd almost been himself. " _Howard Stark_  offered you  _anything_ … And you picked a  _pie tin_?"

That pie tin was Steve's newly painted shield, and it laid on the grassy, cold ground, gleaming in the waning sunlight.

Steve resisted the urge to stick his hands in his pockets. Members of the military weren't supposed to do that: it not only was undisciplined, but, worse, it was disrespectful to the uniform.

He shrugged instead and resisted another urge: to say it reminded him of a garbage can lid. Wouldn't really help his case.

"It's Vibranium," he said with feigned authority, as if that explained it all. "Stops bullets, flat."

Next to him, arms crossed, Bucky tilted his head. "What the hell else you gonna do with it?"

Steve sucked in a breath and blew it back out, using that time to wonder if his idea would  _really_  work. "Giordano."

Made the best cheese pizza pie in Brooklyn, in a dive-looking, hole-in-the-wall shoebox off Metropolitan Avenue – but his temper was  _legendary_. Like when Bucky's kid brother Andrew popped off at the mouth, and Giordano had thrown a pie tin at Andrew's head: a perfect spiral cutting a clean path through the grease-tinged air. The image of Andrew's gashed, bleeding forehead had haunted Steve for years.

Given the current situation known as a World War…

Steve glanced over at Bucky, in time to see him rock on the balls of his feet, an interested eyebrow twitching upward. "Only you. Let's see it."

Steve bent over and picked up the shield, not yet having even  _thought_ of learning how to kick it up from the ground. He looped the straps over his right arm, thought better of that, and switched it to his left.

Like when Peggy expertly shot bullets at it—not at him, he'd convinced himself—the weight was unfamiliar but balanced. It felt good, natural. The metal was smooth and sharp – far more lethal than one of Giordano's joed tins. It would work; he knew it.

Bucky jerked his chin toward the tree line about 150 meters to their south. "Hit the big one."

In the fading sunlight, Bucky's eyes were gray and appraising, ever the trainer. Bucky stepped back, giving Steve distance and himself space to scrutinize.

Bucky never made him nervous. They'd known each other since 1922, and Bucky had stood by him through every illness, every bad mood, every hare-brained idea, and every trip-for-biscuits back-alley fight. The serum hadn't changed that.

So, when the shield wobbled low and hardly sailed 50 meters, Steve couldn't blame it on nerves. Maybe it was too heavy, something he couldn't gauge: nothing was heavy anymore. Maybe it wasn't built to fly like a pie tin (though pie tins weren't built to fly, either). Maybe –

"Your form's shit. Plant your feet and turn your knees toward the target. Use your other arm to aim, like a football."

Steve'd never thrown footballs. Bucky knew that.

The serum made him tall, healthy, built – but it hadn't taught him form, hadn't made him entirely comfortable in his new, thick body, and hadn't given him  _experience_ to temper newfound ability. Leave it to Bucky, and only Bucky, to see that.

"What, you think you can do better?" Steve taunted, knowing that the SSR's serum had already won that challenge. It was something to distract, because maybe Bucky  _did_ make him nervous. Maybe he wanted to finally be…equivalent, and this proved him opposite.

Bucky strode toward the shield, throwing back a "hell no" as he went. He scooped it up with a quick grab, came right back toward Steve, and lightly tossed the shield at him.

"It's pretty light," Bucky remarked. "It should fly."

Must be. Bucky'd tossed it like it had the paltry weight of a baseball. Steve slipped it back over his arm and tried to guess how much it weighed, before accepting that he had no clue.

"Hit the big one," Bucky repeated. "Plant your feet."

Steve did: both feet square, center of gravity low, weight evenly distributed.

In one smooth, innate motion, he turned his knees toward the tree, twisted his right arm around until his elbow lined up the flight path, and flung the shield at the big, winter-bare tree.

The smooth metal cut a clean path through the dusk-tinged air. It whistled as it flew – high pitched, hardly perceptible even to his ears, but a sound he'd never, ever heard before. He watched it soar, ferociously spinning, until it lodged deep into old wood.

Nothing to it.

"How to make a flying pie tin work for you," Bucky smiled, like old, like home, the tiredness evaporating. "But why no fucking pie, Steve?"

A worry-like dread lifted from his shoulders, replaced by a relief he hadn't known he'd been seeking. It worked.  _He_ worked.

"Tell you what," Steve said, sharing that smile. "It's the first thing we do when we get back."

"As long as you're buying, pal."

Steve's smile grew wider, a laugh sinking into the inky night, right before he took off into a dead-heat sprint toward his shield.

Bucky chased, keeping an impossible pace for too many moments. Bucky's smile faded into the burgeoning, weighted burden of understanding. Hindsight being what it is, and all.

***

Steve doesn't disappear into the night, either to search for his shield or to start his own search for Sharon. The hotel doesn't have a blacktop roof to sneak onto.

No, Natasha finds Steve far down a side street, sitting on a crinkly-grass embankment, bare feet soaking in the cold, rushing water of a narrow river. Natasha joins him but keeps her shoes on and limbs dry.

In the distance, the tall steeple of an old church rises high into the night sky. The coarse angles of a ring of mountains chip away at the stars. Blankets of deciduous trees sink into the dark night, keeping secrets and mysteries, unknowns and never-to-be-founds.

It's a cold night – below 30 Fahrenheit, she estimates. She tucks her hands under her armpits and condenses her body, scraping heat wherever she can find it.

"Down by the pond," Steve says.

Natasha's breath soaks into the cold night air. "Hm?"

"Where we bury him."

A cemetery in Brooklyn already has an empty grave with his name on it: 1916-1945. Better to let that play and allow a family to rest undisturbed in happier lies.

"By the big oak, up from the shore," Natasha agrees. "He'd like that."

Steve reaches into the water and lets it run through his splayed fingers. The bubbling, ever-moving water creates a soothing, lethargic ambiance. Here, it's peaceful. Here, it's temporary.

"I know what you're doing. I'm not stopping, until we have her back."

What she'd told Sam earlier was something of a half-lie. She came for Steve. She also came to end this. HYDRA's had their fill.

"You can stay, or you can go," Steve says, nothing angry, nothing unkind. "I don't care, either way."

He won't mind when she stays, then.

She absentmindedly pushes her hands into the frosty grass and pulls her knees closer to her chest. "I didn't forget about your shield. I was waiting for you to ask."

Steve exhales a long breath, then flops onto his back. He points at the stars. "That one's Orion."

Natasha tilts her eyes up. She only knows the constellations well enough to give her a basic sense of her place in the world. A hemisphere.

"There's the shield," he says, voice flat like day-old soda.

She wraps her arms around her knees, appreciates the painful pull of her still-injured shoulder, and wishes she hadn't made her hands cold with the grass.

Steve's hand drops to the ground with a dull  _thud_. He has nothing else to say.

Somewhere, the sun's coming up but, here, not for a little while longer.

***

Thick green grass and weeds have grown over a thick crater that, once upon a time, had been a hidden HYDRA base. Someone's come through and removed the charred, match-stick trees, but broken concrete slabs and rocks dot the landscape like trip mines. Otherwise, time has tolled the damage from the explosion, abundant life finding a way.

Sam toes over one of the slabs, revealing rolled up potato bugs and sluggish, surprised worms. They won't survive winter up here, anyway.

A few steps later, he actually, honest to God finds Barnes' dirty, torn, charred black t-shirt. By now, it's sun bleached and little more than a wet, muddy wad of fabric, likely infested by happy insects.

_It's burned._

_It's fine. HYDRA'll be here; let's go._

Sam leaves it and waits for Natasha and Steve. Not a one of them has admitted that they can't find the shield; hence, why they've walked  _all the way back_ to this old, shitty base.

"Your sneakers were inside," Natasha comments.

"I liked those." Steve spins in a slow, shuffled circle, drinking in the scenery. "I never came here. It all happened…there."

"Bad intel," Natasha replies. "This was a trap, something to keep us from finding you."

Had to find something, right? Sneakers, the shield, and Steve's planted blood had done the trick. Plus: without Sam's wingpack, they all would've been crispy fried morons. Game over. Win-win.

"We went this way," Sam announces. He looks to Natasha and points at the t-shirt. "This is where he changed shirts."

Natasha nods, not yet worried. All the trees look the same, and, this late into October, yellow-orange and deep red leaves still thickly coat each branch. It's going to be hard to see the shield - they've probably already walked straight past it. 

_Fantastic._

Steve and Natasha make their way to him. They all three together follow a half-remembered path back toward Sulden, eyes scanning the trees, feet pulverizing fallen leaves. It'd been night, back then: pitch black, no moonlight, hard to see.

Sam absolutely hates this place. He hates the person he'd been here, saying shit like,  _You can't die, It's not your choice,_ and  _It's the only reason I'm here, doing this with you_.

Looking back, it seems like there were more bad days than there were ever good ones.

"It's going to be near here somewhere," Natasha says. "It looks familiar."

Sam shakes the melancholy and wonders if it'd be worthwhile for him to take to the sky. Also: "We could buy you a pack of frisbees and call it a day?"

Steve doesn't laugh, glare, tell him off, or otherwise respond. Once and forever more, Sam misses the person standing right in front of him.

"'Kay," Sam sighs to himself.

He taps his bracelet, feels his new Stark-designed wings ripple across his back, and flies low, slowly weaving between trees. He checks each trunk for an embedded shield.

Birds scatter.

Squirrels squawk and scamper.

Beetles and ants pace along rugged pads of bark.

In the distance, something that almost looks like a deer runs.

Somewhere, Barnes is laughing at them, if only dead people could laugh.

_CRACK!_

Sam startles and flips around, automatically taking a defensive air position.

But it's not HYDRA or an attack. It's Steve, blood trickling from his busted knuckles. A proud, old oak tree, dated by its thick and weathered trunk, sluggishly, painfully tumbles to the ground with a whimpered puff of yellow-orange leaves.

A storm of left-behind leaves rain to the forest floor. A couple of spooked animals scatter into the depths of the forest. Smaller trees  _crack!_ and  _snap!_  under the weight of the first.

It's only a tree – but what a waste.

Steve walks the length of the fallen trunk, slaps away thick and thin branches, plants his feet squarely atop the bark, and yanks his shield free from the wood.

No quip. No celebration. Barely any relief.

Sam sets down next to Natasha.

Unexpectedly, Natasha tilts the screen of her phone toward Sam, showing him a text message from Maria:  _"We have Agent Carter in a safe location. Return to base. And see me."_

Sharon's safe. Sam closes his eyes and lets the relief of that settle:  _Sharon's safe._

Then, he lets a second wave of relief settle:  _we're done here._

The not-so-hidden implication of that message: Natasha's gonna get reamed for ever being here, for letting this so-called mission happen. So what: SHIELD can't afford to lose anyone else. The worst Maria can do is yell.

Steve walks back down the trunk, hopping off once he clears the tangle of branches.

The shield isn't looped over an arm. Rather, it's held almost violently between both hands, as if he thinks he can crack it in half. The paint is scratched, scorched, and faded, but the metal is as smooth and strong as ever.

Steve's face flushes red, jaw clenched tightly – right before he drops to his knees and turns his back to them. Autumn foliage  _crunches_  under his weight.

"Steve," Natasha says, her tone carrying an unmistakable warning of finality. She waits for his head to tilt slightly toward her voice. "SHIELD has Sharon. She's safe."

He doesn't ask how, or where, or when. His shoulders slump into rounded boulders, hands still trying to crack his shield.

Sam doesn't think it's because Steve's upset that Sharon is safe. Going after HYDRA and rescuing Sharon gave Steve—and Natasha—something to fix. Something to control. A shot at retribution.

Sharon being safe means: go home and live with this. Selfish, but human.

There isn't going to be a mad dash rampage across Europe. There isn't going to be a heroic rescue. There isn't going to be anything.

"Steve. It's over."

Steve goes from his knees to his ass, shield still clutched in his hands, body hunched forward until his forehead presses into the metal. The last person to touch it had been –

Sam sinks down next to Steve and perches his hand on Steve's back. Natasha settles on the other side. All the regrets, mistakes, and sorrows stretch between them.

It's over.

***

The story will continue in  _Chapter 5: Lastlook_.

/***/

He rolls over, scope in one hand, and an aimed SIG Sauer in the other. He takes a millisecond to confirm who it is that he's killing—black tactical clothes, loaded AR-15, HYDRA helmet, only a meter or so away—and then kills.

_BANG!_

The gunshot is a beacon: I'm here, right here, come get me.

Barnes shoves his scope into the side pocket of his backpack, flips up to his feet, holsters his SIG Sauer, steals the dead soldier's rifle, and doesn't run. He  _fucking_  runs.

A harsh, pulsating siren screams through the air. Voices yell and shout in Russian: "there, over there!" They're the grunts; he can outrun them, no problem.

His pack noisily bounces against his back, up and down, up and down. He should drop it, but it carries his tablet, phone, passport, research on the east Berlin base, and money. It's too valuable to drop.

He pounds down the asphalt road, past tall, white stone, windowless buildings. He cuts left, rounds a building, and sprints down two more streets before making a sharp turn right. The goal is to confuse them enough that they can't find him, and at least give himself enough time to get out of Kozerska and into the countryside. He knows the path to Warsaw.

A bullet ricochets off his left arm. Instantly, he calculates the angle and velocity: there are snipers on the rooftops. The next bullet won't be as wasted.

He zigs and zags as he runs, eyes on the next left turn that will give him a clear shot into the railyard, then into the forest. A bullet whistles past his right ear and shatters brick from the wall next to him.

Barnes picks up speed, maneuvering erratically, and baseball-slides around the corner of a tall, red building. Shards of brick rain over his head.

He runs his right hand through his hair and swipes away the debris. He hopes it still looks okay.

It's a three-hundred meter, open air run to the tree line. At his top speed, it would take nearly thirteen long seconds. So: possibly suicide, unquestionably painful.

Barnes checks the rifle for ammunition and serviceability. Satisfied, he shifts it into single-shoot mode and gets to work.

Everything they are today is because of what he was yesterday. He knows how to unravel them with a few quick pulls of the thread.

He shoots the first sniper in the back of the head, the second through the right eye, and the third through the heart. A hoard of footsteps pound from around the corner, and he waits, moments passing by, until the timing is impeccable.

Standard issue gear includes frag grenades, with a fuse delay of four seconds, an injury radius of fifteen meters, and a fatality radius of five meters. During the War, they were called pineapples. Cute.

Barnes steps around the corner, halts the squad lead with his left hand, and then pulls the pin of one of lead's utility belt pineapples. A simple push launches the soldier into a panicked, backwards stumble.

The entire encounter takes only a second.

Barnes turns and runs, screams cutting through the air, followed by a  _BANG_  further and further behind him. He goes faster, sudden anxiety gripping his stomach. He doesn't think all of that was good enough to net him thirteen seconds, not by far.

He can see the forest at the edge of the meadow – through the dead brown weeds, spotted with rotted freight cars, where Steve tackled him years ago.

Then, he'd wanted Steve to disappear to anywhere else in the world. It'd be the greatest gift if Steve could be here with his stupid shield. And a jet. And Natasha and Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The overall plot is absolutely not going where you think it’s going. The entire series is about Bucky, probably to a fault. The next chapter is when this rollercoaster gets going and includes crazy action and spycraft. All the friendship (or pre-slash, depending on your glasses) you can stand is coming up after that. 
> 
> ***
> 
> Musical inspiration: "I'll Never Love" by Michael Kiwanuka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYEin74Xb8I) & "Leave It Alone" by Broken Bells (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36_UiCiIxk).


	5. Lastlook

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mission is called Lastlook, and it ends with Barnes falling like he's fallen before, with the world rumbling away on a set of icy railroad tracks.
> 
> Steve's paints and Bucky's thick book alongside a quiet, autumn road in the backcountry of the Adirondack. Radio shows in the living room, the backdrop to vivid conversations, half-witted arguments, and sometimes quiet evenings that only required easy company. Absurd adventures through the Boroughs of the City – running out of cash at Coney Island, hopping rides in the back of ice trucks in Brooklyn, bar fights in the alleys, beehives in Prospect Park, and passing out drop dead drunk in elevators and trains alike.
> 
> A story about what is lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! And thank you to those who subscribe, bookmark, kudos, and comment. You are all wonderful, wonderful people.

Köpenick, Berlin, Germany. Almost instantly, the blue, afternoon sky shocks into overcast, gray tones that bleakly bleed through the empty, black branches of early-winter trees. A weird, cool, sort of minty sensation runs through him; nerve damage or something, or so Eicher had once babbled about.

Barnes keeps walking.

Thirty-eight minutes ago, Barnes had parked a rental in an empty parking lot near Müggelheimer Damm, stepped off the main road, and disappeared into a sprawling, forested wilderness more suited for Appalachia than a major European urban center.

He's got a backpack on his back, a Wenger compass watch strapped to his right wrist, a SIG Sauer P-220 holstered under his black jacket, and a handful of paper maps clutched in his hologrammed left hand.

The mission is inexplicably called Lastlook. The objective is recon of a potential, abandoned HYDRA base only: do not engage. That means the squirrels, birds, and couple of venison he's seen out here, in the middle of former Soviet Germany nowhere, are safe. He will  _not_  engage them.

Reliant wouldn't laugh at that. Something about "not fucking around." It's been eight months since he's seen or spoken to Natasha, Sam, or Steve. Reliant is his sole, embittered link to that world.

Despite that, he's mostly content, and he's doing okay. He lives in a decent apartment with decent neighbors, earns a decent paycheck, and does decent, boring work that's probably better suited for a historian than an assassin.

This mission, like all the others, is busy work, without much of a purpose. They're – Fury, Hill, Reliant, Natasha, who knows – having him circle shit in a holding pattern. Nevermind that he'd ask –

Unexpectedly, the forest floor slopes downward into a rocky, steep decline.

Barnes stops walking and firmly plants his feet in the dirt. He peers down the slope and thinks it must be at least eight meters until it flattens out. That's a big dip – and not one that officially exists.

He crouches down and unfolds his most recent topo map of this area. He easily approximates his location and then doublechecks the contour lines.

The lines are far apart: flat ground. No lines indicate steep terrain. The entire area of forest, not only this location, shows flat contours. To be sure, he checks two older topo maps and finds the same.

The maps could have been written incorrectly, maybe; or altered by HYDRA, like with the cosmodrome. That thought worms under his skin.

Ridiculously, he looks up past the bare treetops: no Faraday cage in the middle of Berlin. Shocking.

Barnes decides to update Reliant, to be safe. He pulls out his phone, opens the Messenger, and shoots her a quick text: _"Maps don't match terrain. Moving forward."_  He logs his GPS location and stores it on his phone.

Reliant's answer is " _received_." He hadn't expected anything more.

He slides the phone and outdated maps into his backpack, then stands up. He again looks down the jagged slope with its moss-covered rocks, piles of dead leaves, long-fallen branches and logs, and patches of tall, stiff weeds. Not horrendous.

It'll be decidedly worse on the ascent back up. He hadn't brought rope – not for the flat terrain indicated by the maps.

With that thought in mind, Barnes navigates that unpredictable, slippery terrain with casual precision. Should anyone be watching—and no one is, of that he's sure—he would look like a semi-skilled civilian on a day hike. If that hypothetical person would look closer, they would notice that loose rocks don't skitter down the slope, leaves and dirt aren't sunken with boot-print impressions, and barely any sound is made by his descent.

Within minutes, he makes it to the bottom of the slope without so much as a slip or a stumble.

Down here, it's appreciably colder by at least five degrees Celsius. Although it's 1205—midday—frost still crystallizes atop brown leaves and beige grass. Naked tree limbs and that overcast sky provide the only shade.

Fear is still new to him. Something about this place makes that fear seem real, real old.

He resists the urge to draw his SIG Sauer, and he ignores the chill that runs up his back. There's nothing to this place except an abandoned base and bad maps.

_Relax._

He gets going, no longer content to take his time in this place. He wants to get in and get the fuck out. Sunset's at 1557: a little over three hours.

As he moves through the forest, it becomes apparent that the maps aren't kinda wrong: they're for a different planet.

There's nothing flat about the terrain. Round hills, shallow valleys, and craggy boulders — _in Berlin_ —chew up the ground. He takes them head-on, operating under the knowledge that a straight line is the shortest route: he powers up those hills, slides down those valleys, and navigates the rocky land with reckless speed.

From tip to tip, this area of Berlin is supposed to be a tad over three klicks. It's only supposed to have taken a couple hours to navigate the easy terrain, find the base, document and log it, and then get back to the car, well before sunset.

After forty worthless minutes, with no end or boundary in sight, he stops moving at the bottom of a dip between hills. His boots sink into half-frozen sludge. His heart takes a moment to settle into a normal rhythm.

He swings his pack off his shoulders and holds it against the side of the hill with his knee. From a small compartment, he pulls out his phone and pins his current GPS position.

Fuck a straight line.

Backpack re-shouldered, Barnes walks the valley easterly for about two klicks, until it  _finally_ meets a flat, frosted-grass confluence of gorges. He cuts south and sees only flat forest ahead.

Briefly, he considers checking in with Reliant, but he doesn't quite know what he'd say. With a little luck, he should almost be on top of the base, and, with a little more luck, it'll only take a handful of minutes to gather data and leave. He could still make it back before sunset.

Five minutes later, he comes upon a ledge of loose dirt and hard rock that shouldn't exist here. With a heavy pit in his stomach, he walks to the edge and literally sighs relief.

It's a four-meter drop into leaves and a tangle of exposed, thick, upraised tree roots. In the near distance, maybe 1,400 meters out, metal gleams in the dim sunlight.

The base.

He drops down the ledge, lands silently with bent knees, and slides to his stomach. He leaves his pack on his back and takes out his tactical surveillance scope. The roots are upraised enough that he manages to shimmy underneath them.

Scope to his eye, Barnes focuses it on the gleaming metal. Within the space of seconds, he sees an unmapped pond, a barely identifiable black triangle entrenched in the ground, a rusted Lada automobile, and then something that chills him.

He's not going home tonight.

Barnes slides back as far as he can, then twists fully sideways to ensure his entire body is hidden by the roots. He brings the scope back to his eye and lays picture-perfect still.

The pond is bigger than a puddle, smaller than a lake, a couple meters across and a couple more meters long. The water is deep, gray, and murky. Near the middle of the pond, he strains to make out the black triangle, as it blends almost perfectly with the water; it's metal, maybe, or granite. Manmade.

Once upon a time, something else had been here, marked in time by antiquities. A two-meter tall mass of moldy bricks, covered in moss and vines, to the far left of the pond. That old Lada five meters to the north: windows gone, tires rotted, paint long rusted orange. Carved into a tree to the Lada's right, nearly faded away to time and overtaken by bubbling bark, is the Soviet hammer and sickle.

And that something that spooks him: a couple meters north of the Lada, he spots a mildewed, wooden freight car rotting away into the forest. The barest hint of sun-bleached, molding Polish writing flakes on its side. Polish writing in Soviet Germany, in a place where a railway never was, for all the sense that makes.

That ridiculous fear and instinct to  _get out of here_  should have evaporated by now. There's no people, cameras, fences, or buildings. Whatever had once been here is worthless and taken under by the water.

But the maps don't match. A Polish freight car, like the one from the town called Kozerska near Kraków – with the human experiments, the subterranean rail station, and the cracked streets and windowless buildings that  _scared him_ , even in 2015 – sits in the middle of east Berlin.

There's something here.

He can feel it. His instincts  _scream_  it.

He doesn't dare move his arms, let alone reach for his phone to check in with Reliant. This is why they still use him: to do shit like this.

Using the scope, he snaps photos of the site to the internal storage; the GPS location embeds with each photo. They'll be enough to drive research and intelligence efforts back in western Berlin.

The scope's battery ticks from 98% to 97%. It should hold until morning. He lays and waits, the scope as good as a rifle, and the base as good as a target.

The deep orange sun sinks low and dusk gives way to dark. The night sky is cloudy, dark blue, not a star in sight. The tips of black-branch trees bend in the moonlight.

He shifts the scope to night vision mode; bright green overtakes the landscape.

Although it's late December, it's been warmer than usual, today notwithstanding. Crickets still chirp. Bats still squeak. A couple of owls whistle and hoot back and forth. The wind's rough enough to rattle winter leaves and crackle brittle twigs.

For a moment, he's reminded of his first night alone during the War, unsure of every sound; his eyes had created dark, sinister shapes where nothing existed. That person is long far gone – in a good way.

The engines of commercial jets hum overhead. Small animals forage, birds hunt, and the wind warbles between trees and end-of-season brush. The nocturnal world isn't quiet; it's alive, bustling, soothing.

The hours creep by: 1630 to 1700 to 1800 to 1900 to 2000. He wishes he was in his flat with a book, the TV on for background noise. He wishes he hadn't stayed here. That's all: a wish, maybe a realization that all this isn't –

 _Crunch, crunch, snap, snap, crunch_.

The nocturnal sounds cut out, a stereo needle at the end of its record. A swath of artificial light cuts through the darkness – a powerful flashlight, maybe – and flashes against the tree trunks to his left.

A person stands directly above him, on the ledge.

Barnes doesn't breathe.

_Crunch, crunch, snap, snap._

Whoever it is isn't great at whatever it is they're trying to do.

_Crunch, crunch._

It's close. It's only one person: the same pattern of steps, the chaos of only two feet pounding through the forest.

_CRUNCH._

The person drops onto the ground, a few meters to Barnes' left. It's a solid four-meter drop – not a height a normal human could safely jump. Through the roots, Barnes can only see a dark figure, tall and built.

The light slips and bends across the tree trunks, slow and steady.

Barnes watches, more curious than afraid. But he is afraid.

This isn't a coincidence. This place is remote, lost in a tangle of woods that itself is lost to a long-lost Soviet time. He'd poured over microfilm records, near-ancient local history books, and decades of topographical maps  _for weeks_  to pinpoint this general area. People don't  _come_  here – and any regular person wouldn't have hiked over those treacherous hills and rocks in the dead of night.

And then – a person who can take a four-meter drop like it's nothing, who damn near walks right over him. Not a coincidence.

This place is monitored. He'd tripped something.

 _Crunch, crunch, crunch_.

The footsteps move forward, the light bobbing with them, advancing toward the pond.

 _Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch_.

Barnes keeps his position, perfectly hidden under the roots. Any other time, he'd be changing his location and gaining the best strategic advantage, but, this time, although he knows the terrain well, he doesn't know the situation.

 _Crunch, crunch, snap, snap, snap_. It keeps moving away, until it walks into view of his scope.

He sees what he'd originally expected: tall, thickly built, likely male. He's wearing dark, tactical-like clothing and has short, messy, light-colored hair.

Barnes increases the focus and can clearly see an AR-15 assault rifle in the man's left hand. In his right hand – Barnes blinks and looks hard. It's something wide, round, and black; he doesn't know what it could be.

The light turns toward him. Barnes silently palms the scope to avoid a chance reflection off the lens.

In his head, he runs through how this could play, and he plans how long it will take him to draw and aim his weapon, then the best route to escape.

The light turns away, flashes a brilliant blue, and then goes pitch dark.

Barnes brings the scope back to his eye.

Alarmed, he sweeps it across the forest, then zooms out, and then zooms in. He can't find the person.

He makes his heart beat slower and his breathing shallow. This is no time to panic.

Again and again, he methodically scans the forest with the scope and listens to every rustle and crackle around him. The person isn't there.

 _What the hell_  doesn't cover it.

A couple years ago, he wouldn't have thought twice; he would've already been there, finding out what the hell had happened. Today, words float inside his head:  _team_ ,  _together_ ,  _report in_ ,  _back-up_. A small voice adds to the mix:  _you're not what you used to be_.

His gut tells him to get back to the car and finish this out with Reliant. Unsettled, he has no intention of moving until he has the advantage of sunlight. Also, his mission is to recon the base, especially now that something happened near it. That's the mission, and that's the job. That's his worth.

The battery ticks lower, down to 66%. It'll last through morning.

Barnes returns his attention to the scope, purposefully scanning the forest for infrastructure that would typically support an installation. He doesn't spot cameras, traps, or operatives, nor does he see fences, defense lines, or weapons. Nothing.

He relaxes his body and lets it meld into the dips and curves of the uneven ground. He exhales, loosens his shoulders, settles the scope against his eye, and waits.

His mind wanders, at once both focused on the forest and winding around aimless thoughts.

He thinks of the word  _indomitable_ , what he used to be. He wonders if he misses it – and can't arrive at an absolute answer.

He thinks of SHIELD, what he furtively is now. It's been months since he began working with Reliant, and he still doesn't know if he likes it, or if the appeal is in how the work satiates an irreparable part of him.

He thinks of his mom, decades gone, and of her favorite platitude:  _if you know something is broken, why haven't you repaired it?_ Back then, she said it about study skills, relationships, simple mistakes. She never dreamed that he'd be beyond her simple repair, and she probably never dreamed that he'd be ruminating over her stupid truisms almost a hundred years later.

If she's up there, he hopes she's not watching.

That minty, cold sensation comes over him again. Goosebumps prickle up and down his skin: his neck, his arm, his thighs. He blinks, body tensing, and focuses in on the  _motionless_  branches. The leaves there don't move with the wind.

He hadn't noticed –

The right side of his face smacks into pitted, cracked, moss-grown cement. It tastes like old dust, dead chlorophyll, and chalky gravel. The sun shines brightly and warmly, where, moments ago, it had been the dead of night.

Barnes looks up and finds a familiar, frightening town taken by time. Skeleton, stone buildings. Devoured, gray concrete roads. Beyond that, a hundred kilometers of pure countryside.

Kozerska.

The stagnant air tastes stale, its mustiness sticking to the back of his throat. Kozerska, he knows, has been abandoned for fifty years, and yet there are no animals, no birds, no insects.

In 2014, he'd known it, felt it: this is a bad, wrong place. No one should be here. He doesn't know how the fuck he's here  _now_.

It doesn't matter.

He rolls over, scope in one hand, and an aimed SIG Sauer in the other. He takes a millisecond to confirm who it is that he's killing—black tactical clothes, loaded AR-15, HYDRA helmet, only a meter or so away—and then kills.

_BANG!_

The gunshot is a beacon: I'm here, right here, come get me.

Barnes shoves his scope into the side pocket of his backpack, flips up to his feet, holsters his SIG Sauer, steals the dead soldier's rifle, and doesn't run. He  _fucking_  runs.

A harsh, pulsating siren screams through the air. Voices yell and shout in Russian: "there, over there!" They're the grunts; he can outrun them, no problem.

His pack noisily bounces against his back, up and down, up and down. He should drop it, but it carries his tablet, phone, passport, research on the east Berlin base, and money. It's too valuable to drop.

He pounds down the asphalt road, past tall, white stone, windowless buildings. He cuts left, rounds a building, and sprints down two more streets before making a sharp turn right. The goal is to confuse them enough that they can't find him, and at least give himself enough time to get out of Kozerska and into the countryside. He knows the path to Warsaw.

A bullet ricochets off his left arm. Instantly, he calculates the angle and velocity: there are snipers on the rooftops. The next bullet won't be as wasted.

He zigs and zags as he runs, eyes on the next left turn that will give him a clear shot into the railyard, then into the forest. A bullet whistles past his right ear and shatters brick from the wall next to him.

Barnes picks up speed, maneuvering erratically, and baseball-slides around the corner of a tall, red building. Shards of brick rain over his head.

He runs his right hand through his hair and swipes away the debris. He hopes it still looks okay.

It's a three-hundred meter, open air run to the tree line. At his top speed, it would take nearly thirteen long seconds. So: possibly suicide, unquestionably painful.

Barnes checks the rifle for ammunition and serviceability. Satisfied, he shifts it into single-shoot mode and gets to work.

Everything they are today is because of what he was yesterday. He knows how to unravel them with a few quick pulls of the thread.

He shoots the first sniper in the back of the head, the second through the right eye, and the third through the heart. A hoard of footsteps pound from around the corner, and he waits, moments passing by, until the timing is impeccable.

Standard issue gear includes frag grenades, with a fuse delay of four seconds, an injury radius of fifteen meters, and a fatality radius of five meters. During the War, they were called pineapples. Cute.

Barnes steps around the corner, halts the squad lead with his left hand, and then pulls the pin of one of lead's utility belt pineapples. A simple push launches the soldier into a panicked, backwards stumble.

The entire encounter takes only a second.

Barnes turns and runs, screams cutting through the air, followed by a  _BANG_  further and further behind him. He goes faster, sudden anxiety gripping his stomach. He doesn't think all of that was good enough to net him thirteen seconds, not by far.

He can see the forest at the edge of the meadow – through the dead brown weeds, spotted with rotted freight cars, where Steve tackled him years ago.

Then, he'd wanted Steve to disappear to anywhere else in the world. It'd be the greatest gift if Steve could be here with his stupid shield. And a jet. And Natasha and Sam.

Barnes breaches the meadow. The forest is still 150 meters away.

His instincts scream:  _not going to make it._ He  _knows_.

He expects a haze of bullets to the back, or another one of Rumlow's EMPs, or one of HYDRA's tranquilizer stars.

What comes is not any of that.

A solitary pair of steady, quick footsteps fall in line behind his:  _crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch_. Barnes doesn't spare the time or speed to look behind him, but he can tell that the person is only a hundred or so meters behind.

 _How in the fuck_.

He's already running as fast as he can, which is far beyond the speed of even the  _fastest_  normal human. The person behind him sounds even closer.

The meadow gives way to the forest, and the terrain morphs into the rocky unevenness characteristic of this mountainous swath of Poland. The only problem stems from that "indomitable" thought: he's still not used to running, and the treacherous terrain only serves to slow him down.

A couple years ago, he'd researched this area for weeks: analyzing records, memorizing topography, putting pieces of a decades-old puzzle together to find the hidden subterranean complex. He  _knows_  this area.

A tributary of the Tatra River, at the bottom of a 35-meter-deep gorge, is only a klick northeast. It's not ideal, but it gives him his best advantage: he can be underwater for nearly an hour before needing air. It wouldn't be a hiding place but a bona fide means of getting the hell out of here.

Barnes forces his legs to move faster, and then even faster. He darts over rocks, hops over fallen trees, and balances himself against the ever-changing contours of the ground.

The footsteps gain ground on him. The person behind him is  _faster_.

Barnes looks ahead through the splinters of trees, over the sharp rocks and mossy mounds of dirt, and calculates the likelihood of making it in time.

It'll be close enough that he's certain he won't make it. Another rounding error.

He thinks about ending this: turning around and going offensive. His gut says  _no_ ,  _mistake_. Maybe that's the voice of fear.

The  _pelting_  of boots reverberates across dead leaves and hollow, rotted logs. A set of heavy breaths mixes with his own and the telltale sound of rushing water.

It's close. So close. It's  _all_ so close.

He can see the edge of the forest.

The gurgling of the water, hurried steps behind him, and depleted wheezes of his own inhalations weave into a frenetic percussion. It  _is_ fear: unfamiliar, disabling, chaotic.

It's only three meters –

Two meters –

One meter –

The sound of leaves crunching underfoot precede the hand that wraps around Barnes' right bicep. That hand grips Barnes' arm hard and yanks him backwards.

Something agonizingly painful tears through his body, sucks breath out of his chest, throws sparks from his left arm, and dims his vision into gray splotches. It's another EMP.

No one knows where he is. No one will ever find him.

_No._

Barnes turns into the grab, shifts his center of gravity, and drops low to the ground. It's enough that the person loses grip, and it's enough that Barnes has a single opening to draw his ankle knife, roar up, and slash through skin.

It connects.

The person soundlessly stumbles backward.

His vision is too blurry to make out the face, but he unmistakably sees blond hair and a thick build. It almost –

Barnes doesn't waste the time trying to get a clearer look. He spins around; left arm a limp, dead weight; and leaps over the gorge's cliff.

He falls, like he's fallen before, again and again in his dreams, in his nightmares, in his daydreams and thoughts.

He sees the brownish-gray of the rock wall and then feels the shock of frigid water. He plunges down, down, down, and sinks, sinks, sinks into murky, muddy river water.

His body buzzes and burns, muscles twitching and contracting. Bubbles spray from his nose, oxygen bleeding from his body. Something stings the back of his right shoulder; other somethings  _plop, plop, plop_  next to him in a neat line.

Bullets.

He pushes the pain away and focuses on surviving.

Barnes flips his body, so that he faces the river bottom and the opposite direction of the Tatra. The current rushes against him. It's a risk to move against it, but it's a move that affords him two things: cover and surprise.

Although he can't see the bottom, he kicks himself downward. His legs don't work properly: he consciously forces his feet to move and compels them to find a rhythm. His chest is already burning with the craving for fresh air, and it's been, like,  _five seconds_.

 _Ignore it_.

Daylight drains from the water. The shimmering shadows from the promises of above are the only light he can see. The water turns colder in a distinct way – cold like dark stones, the cold of dark and old.

He unclips HYDRA's rifle and lets it sink.

He stretches out his right hand, shoulder screaming that it's not okay to do that right now, and couldn't ask for anything better: it hits muddy silt. He digs his fingers deep.

Barnes pulls his body parallel to the river bottom, and then begins to drag himself against the current, as if ladder rungs were built into the mud. One pull at a time, he glides through the water, away from the bullets and the fast, blond man.

His lungs ache. His muscles are frozen, unwilling, but he forces them to move. The plates of his left arm grate asynchronously. Dark spots pour into his vision. He shoves it all away, because he knows he's good for this. He's  _done_  this. HYDRA made him into this, and he won't let them down when it matters the most.

He pulls with his right hand, counting:

_Four, five._

_Six, seven._

_Eight, nine._

_Ten, eleven._

_Twelve, thirteen._

He tells himself  _one-hundred_. When he counts to a fair, even one-hundred, he can go up. A handful of years ago, HYDRA would have expected exponentially more, and he would have found a way to give it to them.

_Find a way._

He focuses on the numbers and ignores his body's demands. Only the numbers matter. Only the numbers. He counts them two at a time, disciplined in their timing, and pulls himself along the river bottom.

By the time he counts  _one-hundred,_  he imagines he's glided a worthless 300 meters, and only that, if he's lucky. But his lungs feel shriveled, his forehead pounds with pressure, his sinuses sting, and his legs and arm muscles burn and seize: there's no choice but up.

His hand leaves the river bottom, and he kicks upward and toward the river bank closest to Kozerska. Up, up, up: his body craves the surface, knows it's coming, and tries to convince his brain that it can't wait any longer.

He knows it can, despite the perpetual, dark spots shadowing his vision.

It has.

It will.

His right hand connects with the submerged bank and sinks into the gritty, cold sediment. He can see daybreak, only a few meters above.

He ascends the rest of the way in a precise manner, using his hand to control his speed. The goal is to avoid coming up with splashes and gasps. Centimeters from the surface, cold water slips over his face, and he lets only his nose break the surface.

Long ago, HYDRA had taught him to control his body against brutality: no screams, no sounds, no movement. Only calm, precision-paced breaths were allowed. This was their purpose.

He doesn't gulp in air. He doesn't gasp or cough or arch his body. He holds himself perfectly still and breathes with precision pace, the sky above hazy and gray. He relaxes his body so it can recover faster.

He hears voices in the near-distance: calm, brief sentences, clipped words of acknowledgment, and words like "north" instead of "south."

Barnes holds position, both because it's too risky to go to shore and because it gives his body more time to recover.

As the voices fade, and as the white clouds above slowly pass, his lungs calm and his heart stops pounding its beats into his ears. His right shoulder aches, his left arm still sporadically shifts and grinds, and his eyes battle against heavy weights sewn into their lids. He can smell his own water-diluted blood.

He thinks of his bed in Berlin and, of all things, Reliant's commentary on the effect of his bedding choices on their unit budget.  _"You're very expensive."_

The voices long out of earshot, Barnes painstakingly swims further upstream until he feels secure enough to pull himself onto the meager, rocky shore.

He looks up 35 tall meters of the rock-gray canyon wall.

His left arm spazzes.

Over the past few years, he's heard a phrase:  _fuck my life_. It might apply here.

Briefly, he weighs swimming upstream against climbing the wall. Upstream gets him deeper into the mountains. Up the wall gets him closer, faster, to Kraków's train station.

He tries to move his left arm, but it's sluggishly responsive at best. When he tries to make a fist, the fingers jerk and lock up, half-curled. Worthless. Also: his right arm burns and bleeds, so there's that mess, too. There's no way.

Barnes decides to split the difference. He begins walking along the uphill shoreline, eyes on the terrain and ears focused on the skies.

As far as he can see, the shore is walkable, though precariously uneven, rocky, and wet. At full energy and physical ability, it wouldn't be the slightest problem. Today, he's noticeably dragging and not so indomitable. Even now, no matter what happens here, he doesn't miss being that.

He misses Natasha, Sam, and Steve. Hell, he even misses Reliant. He misses home and knows so, because instead of pushing the thought of them away, he uses it as motivation to put one foot in front of the other.

One step, then another, then the next, and one more. Shallow, cold water and bits of muddy gravel splash onto his pants. A worry lingers in the back of his mind: if HYDRA doubles back far enough, he's easily tracked.

So be it.

Barnes draws his SIG Sauer and checks it for serviceability. He drops the clip and clears a bullet from the chamber. Water drains from the slide and barrel. He pops the clip back in, then manually cocks and uncocks it. He thinks it'll fire.

If not: well, that usually depends.

After a time, the river bank thickens, and he comes upon an inlet with a few shaded, rocky outcroppings. He approaches the nearest one, finds it to be appropriately deep enough to provide cover, and slides under it. An unhappy brown spider scrambles away.

Barnes unshoulders his soaking wet pack and plops it between his legs. In one swift motion, he unzips the bag and spreads the flap downward.

He pulls out a wad of wet, paper maps, all of them matted together, ink running in thick splotches. Maps of Berlin aren't helpful in the middle of Poland; these maps in particular may never be helpful again. He sets them aside.

His falsified German passport is soaked but in appreciably better condition. It's embarrassingly useable. He starts a pile separate from the maps, and then adds a handful of Euros and a credit card to the new pile.

His scope is still good, though its battery is nearing 50%. He powers it off, on, and then back off to conserve battery. He clips it to his belt.

The screen of his tablet is smashed. With his left index finger, he pokes shards of glass onto the ground. It's pretty well fucked, so he sets it next to the maps.

His phone is the worst of it. It's crushed. Literally, crushed. The screen is so far gone that its circuit board and wires are exposed. For kicks, he presses the "on" button, then the "home" button. Of course, nothing happens.

Without the phone or tablet as links to SHIELD, he's on his own. For the first time in a long time, it actually matters. He's gotten used to having people. A team. That acquired taste for luxury won't serve him too well.

The phone goes into the "too fucked to matter" pile.

So, he's got a watch, a SIG Sauer, an empty knife holster strapped to his ankle, a passport, some money, and a record-y scope.

Way back when, soon after a train to Brussels lead to a train to Berlin, he'd called it that – a record-y scope – in the meager hope of breaking some sort of ice with Reliant. She'd looked him square and snapped, "It's a tactical surveillance scope. I'm not here to fuck around with you." There was no doubt in his mind: in April 2014, he'd killed someone she'd known, cared about. And Natasha knew it.

He didn't like Reliant, and she didn't like him, but he still wished to god she was fucking around with him right here, right now.

With food.

He didn't bring food. Or cigarettes.

God damn it.

His hair also feels dry. He  _hates_ it when it's dry.

Without thinking too much, he reaches toward a shallow pool of river water with his right hand, and bites back a gasped groan. There's a bullet in his right shoulder, and, without adrenaline, it  _hurts_. He still dips his hand in the water and swipes it through his hair.

He decides not to mess with his shoulder. He'll deal with it later.

Barnes packs up: everything still good in one part of his bag, and everything too fucked to matter in a separate part. He pushes the errant shard of glass from his tablet into the water.

He stands onto stiff, aching legs, shoulders his pack, and doublechecks the shelter for obvious signs of activity. It looks good enough.

He stands still and listens – no voices, no aircraft, nothing human. He hears the gushing water, the calls of birds, and the scampering of winter critters. Although Barnes doesn't trust it, staying put is a death sentence. He's gotta keep moving.

Hugging the canyon wall, he hikes along rock and gravel. The incline is subtle but perceptible, nothing terrible. He barely cares where the tributary takes him, so long as it's away from HYDRA's territory and somewhere he can either blend in or find quick transportation.

It's a funny thought to have, when not even thirty minutes later, he glimpses something that violently rattles and shakes him.

Barnes ducks down, back flat against the wall, and conceals himself under a shallow outcropping.

Panic crawls up his arm.

A tattered red marker is nailed into the rock face. To a civilian, it would be a curious novelty, maybe something to put a nice filter on and stick on Snapagram or whatever. To anyone with a hint of recon experience, it's a surveillance camera guide.

He hasn't been walking out of HYDRA territory. He's been walking deeper into it.

That's the only panicked, uncontrolled thought he allows himself.

Briefly, he contemplates going back the way he'd come. His instincts scream  _no_ , not that they're exactly loving the alternative. It's a bad situation, either way.

That's as far as he goes: a cold, realistic understanding that this predicament could hardly be worse.

But he knows HYDRA, and he knows that a camera here means that something is  _here_. And that something must have an easier point of access than through the bottom of a gorge.

Barnes clenches his left fist, then wiggles his fingers – thinking of Stark, of all people, when he does it – and is happy to find that he's regained some dexterity. Maybe not enough to pull a trigger, or enough to scale a rock wall, but enough to smash a face.

He closes his eyes and takes stock of his body: muscles are stiff, some downright nonresponsive. He feels the bullet wound, a heavy, conflicted pull of exhaustion, and the thrum of adrenaline. His breathing and heartrate are fine. Good enough.

Resolved, Barnes steps out of hiding, draws his sidearm, turns, and pinpoints the camera – affixed high up on the rock wall, lens aimed at the marker. He precisely plugs a bullet straight into the lens—look, his firearm still works—and continues to calmly walk up river.

Not even three minutes later, he sees what HYDRA has here.

He blinks and looks harder, doublechecking himself.

It can't be that easy.

But it is.

It's really there: an oblong, new metal grate built into the rock, a few centimeters above where the rock face meets the river.

Barnes yanks it open, its hinges whining. Water dribbles from the edge of a dark, round tunnel constructed of pitted concrete. He peers inside of it and finds its size remarkable. It has to be at least 2.5 meters tall and 1.5 meters wide – man-sized.

It goes somewhere.

Without wasting any more time, he steps inside and walks.

After a few minutes, the river far behind, not a glimmer of sunlight pierces the tunnel. Even with his enhanced vision, he can't see the walls, or even his hands. It's strange that there isn't emergency lighting – for what almost has to be an emergency egress tunnel.

He keeps walking, right fingers dragging against the tunnel's wall, ears focused on finding threatening sounds. His heart beats too loudly for that.

His throat contracts, as if something has wrapped around it. He dares takes his hand from the wall to check – and, of course, all he finds is his own cold skin and a perfectly intact windpipe.

 _Creak-creak, creak-creak, creak-creak_. Just like the light in the cosmodrome room, when the world stretched between it, a hallway, and a lightless, cold cell.

Barnes takes a deep breath and slowly lets it back out. The world calls it PTSD. He calls it a really fucking bad time for this.

 _Creak-creak, creak-creak_. That tight feeling around his throat again. Raw, throbbing pain around his wrist. Exhaustion chiseling him hollow from the inside out.

_Not now._

He puts one foot in front of the other, fingers dragging. A familiar numbness overtakes his body: buzzing and vibrating and pulling him above himself. It takes every second of training and conditioning across seven decades for him to keep advancing forward, but he does: a step, then a step, another step.

 _Creak-creak, creak-creak, creak-creak_.

Time bends and warps: seconds or hours or minutes pass, or maybe no time at all. He floats, body numb, and walks, no different than a drifting plane set to auto-pilot, until his left boot drags through standing water.

Water.

He stops and realizes that the tunnel has changed, almost imperceptibly. Damp, mildewed moisture hangs thickly, almost claustrophobically, in the thin air. The edges of his fingertips collect cool beads of moisture from the wall.

He thinks of his research from years ago and zeroes in on a hazy memory: a body of water named Lake Kręta tucked between two mountains, uphill from Kozerska, nothing to be found except water and trees.

This isn't an egress tunnel.

It's a Soviet-era spillway.

Potentially, it could be a nice way to scale the gorge, only he has a sinking feeling that he knows what type of spillway this must be.

It doesn't change the fact that he's advancing into HYDRA territory, while wounded, tired, and mentally compromised. He doesn't see another way. So, he keeps going.

As he walks, the expected incline is barely there and certainly not as steep as he was hoping. He's not surprised. He knows exactly what it means and exactly what he's going to need to do to get out of the tunnel.

_Creak-creak, creak-creak._

Barnes stops walking and purposefully drops to his knees, palms flat on the damp ground. The fingers of his left hand dig into the rock, deeper and deeper, until he hears a palm full of crushed bits of sediment and shale give way. He throws the broken rock down the tunnel— _pop-pop-pops_ of drizzle echoing further and further away—and twists into a sitting position.

He stares into the darkness, alone but for his own breaths and the hollow echo of resonating ambient noises. Stress, fear, frustration, and dread bundle in his right shoulder and twist tight, aching knots into his neck.

He feels powerless and out of control. Helpless, even.

Of all the stupid things to think of, he thinks of Brazil – of the chance, of the wasted opportunity, and of this mistake. He thinks of Steve and of that last, charged night – of what it meant to make it home.

Of what it would mean to make it home. Or worse: to not.

He will.

Barnes stands and goes.

Twenty interminable minutes later, he comes to the drop shaft. A pinprick of light shines from a round hole thirty meters above, a straight vertical ascent from his position.

Barnes finds the wall where the spillway conduit meets the drop shaft. The light doesn't reach this far down, and so he relies on touch alone. The wall isn't smooth but it's also not quite uneven. Not an easy climb.

He spares a moment to think through what he knows from the past and has observed from today.

Could it be so easy?

Right hand on the wall, he walks forward only a few steps before his fingers slide against a cold, thick metal rung. He reaches up, shoulder muscles shaking and screaming, and confirms that an access ladder is affixed to the wall. Its metal feels smooth and solid, almost new. There's something –

He has that thought only a half a second before he hears a loud, short  _lurch_  – something heavy scraping across a floor. It hadn't come from above him, or from back down the tunnel. It came from a point behind the wall a meter to his right.

Then: muffled voices, too indistinct to understand, but their tones casual and at rest.

Barnes takes his hand from the ladder's rung. He grabs his almost-forgotten scope, flips it on, and looks through it.

The green, night vision tint illuminates a tall silo – the drop shaft. He slowly turns, seeing the tunnel, then a blank wall, and then, unmistakably, a rounded rectangular hatch door next to the ladder.

Maybe it's a data center, like the one where he'd killed Brock Rumlow. Maybe it's another R&D lab, like the one in Latvia. Maybe it's where HYDRA soldiers live, or maybe it's another base where HYDRA does more experiments on humans.

It's something. Everything here is something more than he'd ever realized, and that – that almost scares him.

The GPS coordinates are logged in the scope. He takes a handful of pictures with it, just to be sure.

Any other day but today, he'd rip the door from its hinges and tear their secret base apart.

Barnes turns off the scope, clips it back onto his belt, and pulls himself up the ladder, a rung at a time. His left hand is more responsive, the fingers moving almost smoothly as they softly  _clang-clang-clang_ against the rungs. He hopes his right arm can hold out long enough.

The pinprick of light grows bigger, wider, and brighter; the air, fresher and warmer. As it does, his right shoulder becomes stiffer and harder to move. Every next reach for a next rung requires more focus and raw willpower.

He doesn't dare stop moving. It's not panic or fright; it's the knowledge that a wasted second, or a single misstep, could make the difference between going home or going back.

He won't go back.

Hand over hand, step after step, he nears the top of the shaft. He's close enough to see that the sky is darkening into a bright navy blue, the moon a slivered crescent. He's close enough to smell the scent of fresh, cold water, while a brisk breeze carries the transient smell of fish. It reminds him of Sheepshead Bay, of another home and another place where he won't ever return.

He doesn't hear voices, breathing, or blood pumping. As he climbs, he listens for the sounds of  _anything_  – but only picks up on birds  _squawking_ , water  _plopping_ , and the dull echo of air blowing through the shaft.

In a moment, he crafts a plan, and, in less than a moment, he executes it. His left hand crests the top of the shaft, and he launches himself up and over it into a smooth roll that propels him into the frigid water of Lake Kręta.

As he rolls, he catches a quick glimpse of something very interesting: another black triangle sticking out of the water, like the one by the forest pond.

His right boot connects with the outer concrete shaft, and he springs off of it, pushing himself as deep into the lake as possible.

Down, down, down, his right arm extended, his hand waiting for silt, feet kicking. Down, down, down – and  _bingo_.

His hand sinks into slimy, sandy mud. He pulls his right shoulder in close, protectively, and uses his left hand and both feet to slowly swim the 20-meter length of the lake bottom.

West is mountains and forest, then a string of villages on the way to Michašta – and then a quiet train to Berlin. That's the plan, then: head west, steal the first vehicle he can, and get to the train station.

Gradually, the lake bottom slants upward, and the depth turns more and more shallow. Dim rays of the setting sun drill through the water. Still, he doesn't hear voices or footsteps – nothing that alarms him.

He still doesn't know that he trusts it.

The shore of the lake is a mix of natural rock and muddy sand. He rapidly scales it and slips into the evening dusk of the thick forest.

Like Berlin, the trees here are bare, dark sticks that bluntly contrast the deep midnight blue of the sky and the brilliant, searing simmer of the setting sun. A swarm of bats zoom through the air, while bursts of translucent white snowflakes melt into spits of rain.

Barnes huff out an intentional breath, to see its white puff dissolve. He doesn't bother his shoulder by running his hand through his hair.

He's suddenly aware of a number of things: how stiff his shoulder is, how cold it is here, of how cold it's been, and of how his pants and shirt uncomfortably cling to his body.

Maybe that will-be stolen car will have dry clothes in it.

That car is over three hours from the lake, and it doesn't have dry clothes in it.

It's a 2000-something gray Volkswagen Jetta, with orange rust creeping around the wheel wells.

It's sitting in an unlit, gray-gravel driveway, hood-to-siding close to a two-story gray-stone house trimmed with flaking cornflower-blue shutters.

The sun long gone, he feels at ease in the darkness, and even more comfortable sliding into someone else's car. Barnes doesn't need to hotwire the ignition or even tip the keys out of the visor; the scratched, black square FOB is already plugged into the ignition, a single red-rimmed house key dangling from the ring.

Barnes twists the key, fires up the ignition, and cranks up the heat. He calmly backs the car out of the driveway, tires crinkling and crunching the gravel, and pulls onto the empty rural road.

His lower back  _pops_  as it settles into the lackluster cushion of the seat. The rest of his body wants to pull over, stretch out, and rest.

In the rearview mirror, the house's lights remain dark. Its occupants are either gone or asleep. He hopes for "gone," so at least they might have another vehicle besides the one he's stolen.

Steve would call it "borrowing."

 _Miss you_. The automatic thought surprises him.

As he turns onto the main road to Michašta, alone on a dark stretch of two-lane highway, his body aching and eyes drooping, he wonders how Steve's been doing. How Sam is coping. Where they are, what they're doing, what their lives are like.

At 0430, he parks the car in an empty, dim parking lot near Michašta's station. He cuts the engine and sits. Outside, an expressway roars close by, vehicles whizzing across smooth asphalt every few seconds. In the parking lot, he hears a low-pitched  _buzz_ from a dark-yellow, flickering light pole.

His right shoulder has stiffened completely and won't move.

He leans his forehead against the steering wheel, stretching his taut neck muscles, and closes his eyes. He tumbles into the kind of sleep where it's not really sleep at all. He can still hear the  _buzz_ of the light and the  _whiz_ of the traffic, and then new sounds: car horns  _beeping_ , loud voices lighting up the morning before the sun catches up, and the piercing  _eee-oh, eee-oh, eee-oh_  of a police siren approaching closer and closer and close –

Barnes snaps awake, a deep breath frozen in his chest.

 _Eee-oh, eee-oh, eee-oh_!

That's real. Getting closer.

 _God fucking damn it_ – he's sleeping in a stolen car, bloody, filthy, and damp, with a loaded gun in the backseat. In  _Europe_. He's done stupider things, but this makes the top five.

He sits still and waits, a quick plan already crystallized: nonlethally incapacitate the officer, ditch the car, and disappear low into the city. Michašta isn't big enough to hide him for long, but for a day, he'll be –

The sirens turn west and bleed away into the night, dimmer and dimmer, until they're gone.

Barnes lets that breath go.

He flips the ignition key a notch. The digital clock lights back up on the dash: 0502 built with lime green pixels shaped like numbers. Not terrible.

Barnes gets out of the car, grabs his bag, and numbly walks nine dull, dizzying blocks to the train station.

Inside the station, the schedule says Michašta to Berlin departs at 0630 with a scheduled arrival of 1403, with a ton of stops but not one change for him. He thinks it sounds like a fantastic opportunity to catch up on sleep. At a touchscreen kiosk, he buys passage in a private cabin, with a little less than an hour to burn.

His stomach grumbles.

A shower and a good look at his shoulder would be fucking wonderful.

A change of clothes—and dry socks, especially dry socks—would be fantastic.

Food and a cigarette.

Hair gel.

Fucking done.

On the kiosk, Barnes taps " _mapa_ ," then " _sklepy_." A long list of stores fills the screen, and, with a tiny spark of hope, he taps on "Tesco." Hours: 24/7. The map indicates it's a few blocks to the west. Barnes taps the "home" button to clear the screen and heads out of the station.

The sun is still below the horizon, but the streets are lit well by tall streetlights. He finds Tesco without trouble.

Inside, the lights are too bright and weigh heavy on his eyes. The aisles are long and damn near endless.

He quickly navigates the aisles for basics: deodorant, hair gel, antibacterial wipes, gauze, tape, baby wipes, two small kitchen towels, a t-shirt, jeans, socks, and underwear. In the food section, he picks up seven random deli wraps and five tall bottles of water. At the checkout, he grabs a newspaper, fresh off the press by the smell of the ink, as well as a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Outside, on a bench in a dark area by the store, he tears into the wraps and finishes every bite within five minutes. The waters go as quickly, the bottles crumpling thin. He throws away the plastic in the nearest recycling container, then ducks behind one of the store's pillars and lights up glorious cigarette after cigarette.

He closes his eyes and inhales every particle of smoke, holding it, letting it take him down, before slowly exhaling. He doesn't understand how nicotine still affects him, while alcohol does nothing, but what the hell. He's not complaining.

He drops a stub, steps on it, and lights up another.

By now, Reliant should have noted the credit card transactions coming out of Poland. He wonders if she's already put out the "holy fuck, what's he doing" alert. More to the point, he wonders how short the leash is – will he be asked "what did you find?" or "what were you doing?"

He's exhausted enough to expect the latter, hands down. Also: he can't fucking answer the first question.

Barnes visually scans the street and thinks  _no HYDRA_. It's weird, maybe, that they didn't grab him at the dam, or follow him here, or –

 _Stop_.

They're not here. He made it out. In a few hours, SHIELD can take care of it.

He checks his watch and sees that he only has twenty minutes. He walks back to the station without much time to spare.

The train comes early, and, almost surprisingly, he boards without trouble. He can only imagine what he looks and smells like, but the first-class private cabin ticket masks sin, he's learned.

Door closed, curtains drawn, he immediately strips and wipes down. Flecks of dirt and bits of gravel and dead leaves sprinkle to the carpet. He pulls on the underwear and pants, leaving his feet bare. New t-shirt in hand, he debates on if he cares to worry about his shoulder right now.

He really wants to sleep, and the shoulder will heal. He can hear Natasha, and Sam, and probably Steve say " _So?"_  It's a good thing they're not here to yell at him.

He pulls on the gray t-shirt, then runs a blob of gel through his dry, formless hair. And that, just that hair gel doing what he wants it to do, is enough to drain his body of tension, ease his mind of worry, and allow him to settle into the seat and close his eyes as a human, rather than a HYDRA asset being put down until the next mission.

Barnes listens to the smooth  _whoosh_  of the train gliding across the tracks and to the soft thrum of the humming engine. He finds solace in the peaceful rhythms and doesn't know the moment he falls asleep.

He dreams of Steve sinking into the inky, murky water again. This time, Barnes frantically grabs at empty water, coming up with handfuls of red tulips from the river's depths – but never Steve. They never make it to the gray cobblestone shore, never to the orange leaves, never to the black luminaire and brass fountain.

Long after the sun has risen and the air outside has turned a little less bone-deep cold, Barnes startles awake, an unsettling sense of dread weighing heavy.

His eyes instantly adjust to the dimly lit cabin, and every one of his systems work in sync to hastily determine that no threat exists.

The wind outside whistles against the train's metal hull.

Barnes huffs out a puff of air and rubs his still-heavy eyes. He can't remember the dream, but there's something dreadful gnawing in the back of his mind. It feels different than a memory but like something he should  _know_. Something obvious – and bad.

Barnes slips the curtain open a sliver. Droplets of early morning rain cling to the window.

He hadn't slept for shit, evidently. It can't be any later than 0900.

Five hours to go.

Barnes relaxes back into the seat, although his right shoulder is extremely unhappy with the unnecessary, minute motion. The raw nerves throb, but he really doesn't want to mess with it.

He glances at the folded newspaper from the store, and also doesn't want to mess with that.

He closes his eyes and enjoys the immediate, sweet relief. In the darkness of his own mind, he wonders –  _what the hell happened yesterday?_

_How did I go from Berlin to Kraków?_

_What are they doing?_

That's not the right question. He'd known in 2015 that Kozerska was a bad place; he'd felt it in how panic shredded through his skin and in how that feeling— _bad, wrong, leave —_ had eclipsed every irrational thought, until it only mattered that he made sure Steve and Sam got out of there.

So, the right question might be:  _What have they always been doing there?_

In 2015, he'd found an abandoned research base there. The hallways had been pitch black except for the pinprick of his weapon's fading light. The walls had been crumbling and the doors creaking and rusted. Only, it hadn't really been abandoned. On the ninth subfloor, he'd killed a starved, rabid human experiment and been caught on camera doing it.

He'd run, hidden, waited for SHIELD, and then gone back in to help Steve and Sam. Then, he'd run again and hadn't stopped running until he'd boarded a train much like this one, on a track to as far away as possible as quickly as possible. He'd never thought about going back.

Barnes' eyes open.

He'd only seen a sliver of that sprawling complex. He hadn't explored at least a dozen subfloors, or barely any of the underground subway station, and not even an inch of the town.

Newfound, restless energy surges through his body. He sits up straighter, mind rolling with thoughts, conclusions, and questions – but circling back and forth around only one:  _What the fuck are you doing there?_

Too wired to sleep, Barnes pulls the window curtain open and watches the winter-gray Polish countryside blur by. That thought repeats, over and over, as if the words themselves contain the answer:  _what are you doing there, what are you doing there, what are you doing there?_

Poland gives way to Germany, Frankfurt comes and Frankfurt goes— _you fucking idiot, you drove it straight into a wall_ —then Jacobsdorf, the forested expanse of Glieningmoor, Fürstenwalde and tiny glimpses of the Spree, until the outskirts of Berlin blend into rows of houses.

Kurpark whizzes by. He can see the edge of Köpenick and Müggelheimer Damm but none of its mysteries.

_What are you doing there?_

The train passes the stadium, buzzes past Biesdorfer Baggersee, and curves around Rosendelfer Ring, before gently pulling into Berlin-Lichtenberg station.

Home.

His watch says they're early even: 1415.

Quickly, he puts on his socks and shoes, shoves everything else into his bag, and stiffly departs the train, only to buy a train ticket to the Berlin Reinhardtstraße station, close to his flat.

About 30 minutes later, he walks across a pedestrian bridge over the Spree, then down Albrechstraße past a lot of small restaurants and coffee shops that make his stomach rumble with hunger, and finally to his narrow, brick street.

In his building, Barnes trudges up the creaky wooden staircase, hangs a left, walks across the noisy floor, and stops outside of his flat's door. His hands uselessly pat the empty pockets of his new pants.

"Son of a fucking god damn motherfucking bitch," he breathes.

His keys are somewhere at the bottom of a river in Poland. He hadn't even –

 _Fuck_.

This day can't get worse. It can't.

Barnes breaks the door handle, steps inside, and shoves his backpack against the door to keep it closed. He latches the door for good measure, then squats down and takes the scope out of the pack.

He hooks it up to his laptop, authenticates in to SHIELD's secure network, pings Reliant, and begins uploading the contents of the scope. He opens the messenger screen and types  _dinner sounds good; somewhere with IPA._

It's code for:  _need to meet ASAP._

With that going, he starts a pot of coffee, then strips down naked, leaving a path of cheap supermarket clothes all the way to the bathroom. He turns the shower on full blast, full heat, steps in, and  _melts_.

Dirt, specks of leaves and gravel, and blood swirl down the drain. He runs his left hand through his hair and leaves it on the nape of his neck, the muscles of his back jumping from the shock of the water.

He lets the water pound into the shoulder wound, as painful as it is. Three dark clots of blood hit the tub and roll stubbornly down the drain, followed by a stream of fresh, red blood. It's running clear and bright, which is good.

While his shoulder runs its course, he plops a blob of shampoo into his hair, rubs it around with his left hand, rinses, and gets out. He wants coffee and a talk with Reliant more than he wants the luxuries of home.

He dries off, stuffs a messy wad of gauze into the wound in his shoulder, gets dressed in black and gray wools and cottons, runs cream through his hair, pours a cup of coffee, and checks on his laptop. The upload is still running—at 76%—and Reliant hasn't messaged back yet.

"Come the fuck—"

The date on his laptop is wrong. It's four days ahead.

It needs reset, of course. Out of curiosity, Barnes goes over to his bag, grabs this morning's newspaper, and sets it down next to the laptop. He takes a few gulps of coffee before glancing at the date on the paper.

Four days ahead.

"What the hell."

He's exhausted – maybe his brain has it backwards. Mentally, he runs through it.

The mission began on Tuesday morning. He spent the night in the forest, inching into Wednesday. Then he magically disapperated or something to daytime Poland and made it to Michašta by Thursday morning. Today should be Thursday.

The laptop and paper say Monday.

"What the hell," he repeats, hearing the panic in his voice.

Had he blacked out? He's lost hours while drifting on memories, but never whole days. A worse thought crosses his mind: HYDRA  _had_ gotten him, did something, and sent him on his way.

He shakes off that thought. If HYDRA managed to get ahold of him, they'd keep him, no question.

Barnes locks onto one detail: it'd been daytime in Poland, when it'd been nighttime in Berlin. It had to have happened then.

_What the hell are they doing?_

The upload chimes: 100%.

Still nothing from Reliant. After four days of being off the grid, he can only guess what measures she's taken and what theories are being thrown around. And all he's got is a stupid story about time travel and teleportation that sounds ridiculous in his own head.

Wonderful: he can hand in some Harry Potter books as a mission report. Easy.

That aside, this is big. The weight of it feels much like it had during the War, when he couldn't believe his eyes – and, later, when the mass graves, human experimentation laboratories, and maps filled with HYDRA installations seemed too overpowering and devastating to overcome.

For now, he does all he can do: drains his cup of coffee, while absentmindedly drawing circles around the newspaper's date and waiting for Reliant. After a few minutes, he tosses the pen onto the floor, leans over the table, and buries his head into his arms.

His shoulder can't decide if the stretch of muscles hurts or feels good.

He closes his eyes and dozes, head spinning in loops and dives.

 _Chirp-chirp_.

Barnes uses a hand to pull his laptop closer and turn the screen toward him. He raises his head high enough to use one eye to read the message from Reliant:  _1700, Omega 2._

Not a whole lot of time to get there.

He drags himself out the door.

Omega 2 is a small flat down Köthener Street, near the Park. To get there, he takes the bus to Leipziger. It's SOP to walk the rest of the way, in case someone happens to be following.

Barnes walks toward Potsdamer Platz, the reaching skyscrapers glittering down the street. He rounds a corner and cuts through the backside of Leipziger Plaza, toward Erna-Berger-Straße, and juts through a parking lot with a few cars parked in it.

He comes up on a round, concrete plaza, encased by a half-circle of tall white and gray buildings filled with shops, restaurants, and offices. He walks its sidewalk, ignoring passersby and the rumbling zoom of traffic next to him, his thoughts once again back to  _what the hell are you doing there?_

_What are you—_

A fucking car spinning through the fucking air fucking hits the left side of his fucking body. It propels him into the air, its 1400 kilos of weight absolutely outmatching him.

His back hits a brick-and-glass building, pain splintering up through his neck and into his head. Shards of glass pelt against his head and face.

The car, its metal red hot, heaves into his chest and abdomen, pushing and pressing and burning, until it finally, finally crashes to the sidewalk.

It lands on its driver's side, glass crunching, metal crushing.

Barnes topples on top of the crumpled car. His ears ring and vision blurs. He smells burnt plastic, acrid smoke from an explosive, and cooked flesh.

He blinks, vision clearing only marginally, and looks inside the windowless car door. In the front two seats, he sees two dead people. In the backseat, he finds a boy of about nine: bloody, glassy-eyed, but breathing and alive.

His training urges him to forget the kid, get away from the car, and evaluate the threat. His brain demands a weapon and asks why he's been wandering around  _anywhere_  without a sidearm.

Something else entirely, something from somewhere inside of him, says out loud, "Give me your hand" and that something else entirely extends his right hand toward the kid.

To his own ears, his voice is a thick echo from faraway. That sharp, splintering pain going up his neck builds and builds, a horrible pressure mounting inside the right side of his forehead. His fingers are numb, which makes two hands he can't feel.

None of it matters. Only the mission matters, and his mission is this kid.

This kid, who doesn't move. It's shock, and it's okay.

Barnes reaches into the car, his right shoulder and stomach uncomfortably pressing into the door, and manages to grab the kid's red jacket by the very tips of his fingers.

The kid doesn't react, and that's still okay. Barnes pulls him up, a weightless 35 kilos, and slides him through the window opening. A glossy, red burn slicks down the left side of the boy's face and neck; glass shards are embedded in his cheek.

" _Es ist_  okay."

Bullets  _plink plink plink_  against the car.

With those bullets, the world catches up.

Screams of bystanders. The pattering of shoes running across the concrete. Police and ambulance sirens wailing a few blocks away –  _eee-oh, eee-oh, eee-oh_. Toxic black smoke curling into the air, tingling the back of his throat.

Through that smoke, through the flickering black blurs of his vision— _not now, not now, bad time, not now_ —he sees a group of black-clothed figures, all carrying rifles, and one of them –

A hollow-point bullet hits his left shoulder; another plunges into his left thigh. Neither are very consequential to him.

Barnes jumps off the car, the boy in his arms, and runs toward the Clovis restaurant down the sidewalk. He doesn't know if anyone is still inside, but, with him, the kid is dead.

Bullets whistle past his body. He hears the distinct sound of an RPG-17 being loaded, and he hears the  _pop_  when it's fired. He keeps running, because maybe if he can save this kid, if he can make  _one difference_ , he can –

One of the sirens goes dead: a shrieking  _eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee_  as it cycles down, the grinding  _scraaaaaatch_  as its car is propelled across asphalt, and a booming, shaking explosion when the vapors in its fuel tank ignite into a scorched-metal fireball.

It's out of his playbook.

He keeps running, a guttural moaning sound coming from the boy. He's only a couple meters from the restaurant when he hears a unique whistling sound.

It's the sound of smooth metal cutting a clean path through the smoky air.

It's a sound he's known for more than seventy years.

It's a sound he helped create, while fucking around with his best friend in 1943's Italy. How to make a flying pie tin work for you  _but why no fucking pie, Steve._

Barnes spins around, shifts the boy into the crook of his right arm, and catches Steve's shield with his left hand.

It's all-black: no stripes, no star, no color.

Back near the destroyed car, Barnes sees a figure standing inside the smoke: broad-shouldered, tall, thicker than fucking Tolkien. He's got blond hair, Steve's face, and is wearing all black – no stars, no spangle. He's armed for war, with an AR-15 cradled in his hands.

Another piece of yesterday's puzzle slides together.

Barnes can't breathe, can't move, can't think. The world begins and ends with one reality: HYDRA has Steve.

 _Eight months._ It's only been eight months. How –

Steve aims the rifle.

Barnes turns and dashes for the restaurant, pushing it all away. Everything.

He feels a sting in his lower back. It's only a sting.

He makes a sharp turn and yanks open the restaurant's locked door. He hears crying, gasps, and whispered prayers. The first person he sees is a guy, maybe 40, huddling underneath a booth.

Barnes gently sets the boy down next to that booth. In German, he says, "His parents are dead. Take him and stay hidden."

When he turns back around, Steve is already inside the restaurant, weapon aimed.

Heart skipping, sweat beading, Barnes wastes no time: he runs toward Steve, black shield up, bullets ricocheting, and slams into him at full speed.

Steve budges only a meter or two, barely out the door, his left hand wrapped around the top of the shield. Barnes' street shoes don't provide enough traction to strong-arm Steve the rest of the way.

Face to face, Barnes tries to find something of his friend. Steve's expression is blank, but his eyes are – angry and hate-filled. 

"You've killed people," he tries, and fails.

Nothing: not a flicker, not a blink, not fucking anything. Which is great, absolutely great, because Barnes remembers the highway bridge and the helicarrier, and he remembers being the same fucking thing.

"Please don't make  _me_  do this," he tries again, and fails again.

Steve tries to twist the shield out of Barnes' hands, but Barnes uses the move against him: leveraging his body the opposite way, ripping the shield out of Steve's hand, dipping down, grabbing the sidearm out of Steve's left thigh holster, and back-kicking Steve square in the chest and straight through the restaurant's glass door.

Something in Barnes' back tears; he goes down to one knee, fingertips splayed on the tile floor, oxygen harder and harder to come by. Droplets of sweat drip onto his hand.

He pushes himself up, resolved to see this through – for Steve.

Outside, Steve's not alone. Coming up behind him, there are at least  _sixteen_  HYDRA soldiers, armed and ready.

They are…not fucking around today.

If they start firing, people in the restaurant are going to die. People in every one of the buildings will die. Bullets aren't neat, aren't controllable. They rip through walls. He knows.

He's got a nine-millimeter with an unknown amount of ammunition; a couple new bullet holes in his body; and a shield. Less than optimal.

Barnes looks beyond what he has and almost instantly sees a useable weapon. It's about five meters to his right, almost dead center between him and HYDRA. It won't stop Steve, but, if he can get there, it'll stop most of the others.

He sprints.

Bullets fly. If some hit him, he doesn't notice.

His eyes are only on the empty, green car five meters to his left – the thing he can make a weapon, the way HYDRA'd trained him. Anything can be a weapon.

Four meters out, he picks up speed, his injured thigh beginning to burn, and then, two meters out, he jumps feet-first at the bottom of the driver's side of the car.

The car hurtles toward the sixteen HYDRA soldiers, side-over-side, glass shattering, metal crunching, asphalt gouging. Barnes transitions into a low back handspring, and then uses his left hand to spring his momentum into another sprint: behind the rolling car, nine-millimeter ready to go.

As expected, they don't see him. Six of them are on the ground; some bloody and injured, some already dead. Barnes shoots: one bullet to kill each person, calmly progressing from soldier to soldier. Three of them die before the rest of them notice.

Barnes throws Steve's shield at the front of the group, then kills the fourth nearest him by ripping out her trachea. He keeps ahold of her body as a new shield. It's dirty, but, today, necessary.

He drops the nine-millimeter and uses her AR-15 to shoot three others. Her body is pelted with bullets, one after another after another. Flashes of metal spark from his hologrammed left arm:  _plink, plink, plink, plink_.

He kills the last four standing, unclips the AR-15, drops his human shield, and executes the six soldiers that had been hit by the car.

Even though Steve is still here, somewhere, Barnes stupidly turns around and looks at the bodies, at the blood, at the destruction. He hates the person that can kill so easily and efficiently. It doesn't matter  _why_. It only matters that he  _had_  and that he  _does_.

Sixteen people.

That's all the time he has to angst over that.

Barnes spins and raises his left arm, batting Steve's shield away. He doesn't care to see where it lands. His eyes find and lock onto Steve.

None of this was ever supposed to have touched Steve. But it has. It has.

Barnes flips the rifle to single-shot. "We're not doing this again."

Like Steve ever listens.

Steve runs toward Barnes, and Barnes gets off three shots—right arm, stomach, right thigh—before Steve is too close. Barnes raises the rifle and brutally brings its butt down hard into the side of Steve's head.

In one smooth motion, he lets go of his rifle and grabs onto Steve's, twisting its strap into an X, then front-kicking Steve square in the chest with his right leg. Something  _crunches_ under Steve's jacket – not bone, because something blue and bright sizzles right after the  _crunch_.

Part fear, part rage flashes across Steve's face. Barnes doesn't waste time wondering.

The strap snaps, at the same time Steve grabs Barnes' leg with both hands. Steve tries to flip him down, but Barnes taught Steve that, and  _hell no_.

He uses the momentum from Steve's attempted countermaneuver, with a little added oomph from his waning left leg, to launch himself over Steve's head, pivot around, and garotte the body of the rifle against Steve's throat.

Steve's hands wrap around the rifle and try to pull it away, but Barnes has the infinite benefit of his left arm. Nothing and no one moves that arm.

Barnes uses the time to move them around in a full 360° circle, so he can check for other threats.

A building is on fire, billowing thick, black smoke. That police car is burning through black plumes of rubber. Through all of the smoke, he doesn't—can't—see anybody. He hears sirens and the distinct  _whap-whap-whap_  of an approaching helicopter, but that's all.

It's only him and his brother, locked in another vicious dance.

His left arm gives. The surprise shocks him for a second he can't afford.

Steve elbows him in the face and rotates, combat knife drawn and extended. Barnes feels it cut through his street clothes, dig into the skin of his stomach, and slash across the underside of his right arm.

It nicks the artery.

He's gotta end this.

Steve comes at him, fast and intense, that knife still in his hand.

Barnes steps back, back, back, back, dismantling the rifle with each step, step, step, step, and defends the first swipe with his left arm. Steve strikes again, and Barnes dips under the lunge, coming up behind Steve. He pulls Steve's wrist with his left hand, then pushes Steve's elbow with his bloody right hand.

_Snap._

A scream, the first.

Barnes catches Steve's dropped knife and viciously kicks Steve in the back, propelling him into that green car.

Steve flips from his stomach onto his ass, but he doesn't so quickly get up, not with three bleeding bullet wounds and a broken arm. The leg wound is a gusher.

Not that Barnes' arm or thigh are doing any better. Twinsies.

Barnes takes a step forward, knife firm in his hand.

Last year, Barnes had made the very wrong mistake of thinking that Steve didn't remember him. It hadn't been that at all. The only way then and the only way now that Barnes knows to save Steve – is to do the worst thing.

He takes another step forward.

It's something he still wishes someone would have done for him.

And another step.

It's just…

Paints and a thick book alongside a quiet, autumn road in the backcountry of the Adirondack. Radio shows in the living room, the backdrop to vivid conversations, half-witted arguments, and sometimes quiet evenings that only required easy company. Absurd adventures through the Boroughs of the City – running out of cash at Coney Island, hopping rides in the back of ice trucks in Brooklyn, bar fights in the alleys, beehives in Prospect Park, and passing out drop dead drunk in elevators and trains alike.

Another step.

Steve struggles to stand – left leg supporting his weight, right arm held to his side. Barnes sees fear. Smells it. Feels it.

A desperate plea on a helicarrier:  _"You've known me your whole life."_

So wrong, but so right.

Barnes makes it to Steve, bats away a decent punch, and shoves Steve against the car. He kicks Steve's left leg down with his own, raises the knife—Steve flinches—and drives it into the metal of the car, hilt-deep.

Steve's reaction is human, very human: eyes wide, a jagged exhalation, and more fear. A lot of hate.

The difference here—maybe HYDRA hasn't realized it—is that Steve was never a killer. He was a kid who went to war to save lives, and he's still a kid, all of thirty-four years old.

_Whap, whap, whap._

That helicopter is close. It's not military – it's civilian.

No Quinjets. No gunfire. No stomping of feet.

It's done.

He thinks to disarm Steve and is about to do that, when he hears the  _clack_ of a sidearm and a shaky, " _Polizei!_ Hands up! Turn around!"

Turning around means putting his back to Steve, and there's no god damn way. None.

His eyes locked on Steve, Barnes puts his hands high up and answers in clear, slowly spoken German words. "I'm U.S. government. He's armed."

"Turn. Around!"

Steve's hand reaches for the Beretta in his shoulder holster, a sort of smile on his face. Steve's smart and getting brighter about it.

"Don't you fucking do it." Barnes isn't sure if he's warning or begging Steve. "Don't do it."

"I said turn around! Last cha—"

Everything happens at once. Steve pulls the Beretta, Barnes lunges for him, the officer shoots, Steve shoots, Barnes' palms and knees scrape against asphalt, he smells blood, and that  _whap-whap-whap_ is deafening – wind blowing and spinning cyclone plumes of dust and debris around him – the roar of engines piercing his ears—and Steve is gone.

The officer is dead – skull blown through.

Blood drips onto the asphalt – from his arm. Whatever.

Barnes looks up and sees that helicopter—a fucking news helicopter, anything to get a story—low to the ground, with a blur of blond pulling himself into the open passenger area.

Barnes sprints toward Steve's black shield, picks it up without stopping, and pumps his legs as fast as they'll go. Looking across the plaza, he times the throw and the jump against his speed.

First the throw: he flings the shield at a white-brick building. It  _whistles_  through the air and lodges into the bricks above a white-and-yellow sign that tauntingly advertises  _happy deutscher Kaffee_.

At full speed, Barnes hurdles onto the back of a sedan, runs along the roof, and then springs off of his least injured leg – up, up, up, and up toward the shield.

His right foot lands on the shield, and he immediately launches off of it. It gives under his weight but miraculously holds long enough to provide him the height he needs.

He soars and soars through the air, the helicopter banking away as his sticky right palm hits the middle of the left landing skid. He grips it, spins himself around, and pulls himself up, high enough to punch through the bottom of the fuselage with his left fist.

The helicopter levels off and picks up speed, jumpy in a way that screams "inexperienced pilot." Too bad for Steve, because even though he hasn't done something this extreme for a good, solid year, the instincts, clarity, and razor-sharp focus snap back.

Nothing can stop him, not even the Sam-like voice in the back of his head saying,  _dude, use the fucking door_.

He punches another hole in the fuselage, then another, ignoring a tangle of wires and the dim screeching of alarms from the cockpit. He pockets the knowledge, however, that the helicopter is going to go down, and it's his job to make sure it doesn't take out a building when it does.

Barnes rips a him-sized hole in the floor of the helicopter, pops the jagged metal up into the cabin, and pulls himself through. Instantly, he zeroes in on three bodies on the floor: neat bullet wounds in each of their heads, two with their eyes open.

For a moment, only a moment, the sight stops him.

Barnes pushes himself to his feet, street shoes sliding on a small pool of blood, and strides to the cockpit. He sees the top of Steve's head – a pile of unruly blond hair. Still hears those alarms, louder now, and knows that Steve can't figure out how to fix the problem.

For a moment, Steve stops trying to fix it. He reaches around with a SIG Sauer MOS-22.

Barnes figures the angle inside of a split second and doesn't even bother dodging; the bullets bounce off of his left arm, and he keeps on walking, right up behind Steve's seat. He grabs Steve's hand with his right, forcing Steve to aim the weapon away, and wraps his left arm around Steve's throat.

"Steve,  _stop_."

The helicopter nosedives.

Barnes glances down and sees Steve's hand around the collective, pushing it low. The engine speed doesn't decrease. They're going to crash into the city, unless he can take the controls.

He squeezes Steve's throat tighter and struggles to keep the MOS-22 pointed away. It fires two bullets through the cockpit's windshield and another into the controls. Barnes manages to push the gun lower, and the next bullet, with Steve's finger on the trigger, goes into the side of Steve's right knee.

Steve screams, a strangled sound, his face deep, dark red. It's a sound Barnes never wants to hear again and something he never wants to see again. The gun  _clatters_  onto the flight deck's floor.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," Barnes whispers, even as he watches Berlin's buildings and congested streets fill more and more of the windshield. "I'm sorry."

Steve's body goes limp,  _finally_. Barnes pulls him straight out of the seat, then out of the cockpit. He drops Steve on the floor and rushes back into the cockpit, taking the damaged controls. He doesn't have time to think of strapping in, or doing anything except steering the broken helicopter.

His adrenaline spikes a notch higher.

The collective control is  _dead_ : it jiggles back and forth in his hand, useless. Without it, he can't change altitude. They're going to crash; it's only a matter of where and who it kills.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck –_

The Spree.

Barnes looks out the left window and sees the Spree. A few days ago, he'd ordered a glass of incredible beer from Brauhaus Georgbrae, right along the riverbank, while waiting for Reliant.

It's maybe a klick away, which means they're  _maybe_ 15 seconds away at their current speed.

Barnes shifts the cyclic control to bank the helicopter left, and then swings the nose left with the tail rotor pedal. The river comes into view, below the rooftops of buildings.

It's going to be so fucking close.

The seconds bleed out of time, too quick to count. The helicopter's flight panel screams with blinking lights and high-pitched alarms. The dead collective shakes and shakes, its plastic  _taptaptaptaptapping_  back and forth against its metal casing.

A tall building soars into view, one that they're going to hit.

That's it.

He's dead, and Steve's dead.

He banks around the building, losing precious position too close to the river. In about three seconds, they're going to hit the water sideways, and they're not going to survi—

A blur of shiny red and gold fills the windshield. He doesn't have time to think about what that blur might be. His body becomes weightless, out of his control, and he feels himself flinging forward.

Glass shatters.

He sees that red and gold again, for the half of a split second before he feels a burst of tremendous, paralyzing pain.

Berlin and the Spree bleed to black, out of reach and far away, and he knows he's falling—falling like he's fallen before, with the world rumbling away on a set of icy railroad tracks—but he's gone before he hits the gray ripples of the river water, and he's gone before his body sinks, sinks, sinks, down, down, down.

***

The story will continue in  _Chapter 6: The Wrenchworks._

/***/

“I walked into this base, knowing what could happen. I don’t blame you. I’m not mad. I’m good with this. Don’t let HYDRA have anything more than they’ve already taken. Don’t think about this.”

Tony stood still. His hands fell to his sides. He locked his jaw.

“Trust me. I won’t.” Rogers.

“Then finish it. ‘Cause I’m with you, ‘til the end of the line.”

Tony tensed, bracing himself for the inevitable gunshots. They didn’t come. Rogers yelled, “You’ve taken  _everything!_  You can’t have that!” and then “I’m going to kill you I’m going to fucking kill you!”

Frantic coughs and pleas cut through Rogers’ yells. Words like “stop” and “Steve.”

Tony went back to the glass window, arms wrapped around himself now. The colors on the monitors had flipped around. That one doctor wasn’t bouncing anymore. Internal defibrillators that looked like tongs were out.

On the video, Tony heard groans and coughs.

Then silence, stretching; Tony’s stomach, curling. He knew how it ended. He was looking at it.

“I didn’t mean what I said in Kraków last year.” Barnes’ voice was raspier than Steve’s. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

Another stretch of silence.

“Steve?”

_Bang!_

Wet, thick coughs.

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

The audio bled to static.

Later, Tony would try to watch the video again but only manage to watch the timestamp run through numbers for fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds. To be exact, 14:35.02 was how long it took for Barnes to let Rogers kill him.

Barnes’ vitals crawled into the single-digits, and his god damn right arm came up again. The anesthesiologist shook his head, sweat running down his forehead: an  _I don’t fucking know_  if Tony’d ever seen one.

Medicine was precise and pre-calculated; if X happened, do Y. People like Rogers and Barnes were the proverbial wrenches in the works, the grit in the oiled machine. Their bodies didn’t react to medicine the expected way.

Tony wasn’t a doctor, but he was a scientist, and it didn’t take one who studied rockets to figure out that those doctors down there were playing a blindfolded game of Pin the Tail.

The vitals crashed again. Tony didn’t look away. The impossibility of a person down there wasn’t the person who’d killed his parents.

A year later, almost to the day, at some time past three in the morning, Tony rode an elevator inside the new SHIELD headquarters. It glided to a soft stop, and a computer he’d programmed announced “Subfloor Four” in a sugary female voice.

The doors slid open.

Tony hesitated, considered going back up, but made himself step into a cold, gray, bright, sterile hallway. They could’ve done better with the design down here. Something less on-the-nose.

The doors closed. The empty car glided up.

With a purpose he didn’t have, Tony strode down the cold, gray hallway, passing gray, steel doors, one after another after another, until he came to a set of locked double-doors. He glanced up at the optic recognition system and heard an expected  _click_.

He pushed through the doors and stepped into the morgue.

The lights were already on. The drawer was already open. Steve was already sitting with the body: shoulders hunched, head low, his hands clutching a dead person.

Tony wracked his brain for a single fucking thing to say.  _“Don’t let him thaw out – it’d be pretty gross”_  crossed his mind. Sometimes Tony hated himself.

When his parents had died, he’d only wanted to be left alone. He hadn’t wanted to talk or see people. Instead of any of that, he’d inherited a multinational weapons company and friends who’d only seen a kid guarding a cache of wealth with a Styrofoam sword.

Tony grabbed a stool, set it beside Steve, and sat.

A few days after Death Valley, with his right hand encased in red and gold armor, Tony had escorted Steve to a mutually safe place in the Tower – something akin to a psych ward.  Halfway there, barefoot and broken, Steve had begged, “Take care of him.  Please, Tony.”  All Steve had needed to hear was, “I will,” and Tony had given him that, meaning it. 

_I will._

Tony hadn’t kept the promise.

Briefly, Tony glanced down and saw everything he didn’t want to see. The autopsy incisions made it real: no miracle, no last minute save, no coming back, find a new friend.

Somewhere along the line, SHIELD had so significantly failed.      

Shoulder-to-shoulder, Steve and Tony sat in silence, and Tony thought that, once upon a time, all of this could have not been this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this one's a bit (okay, a lot) more comic book-y than KST. Buckle up, and I sincerely hope you enjoy the ride. :)
> 
> Musical inspiration: "Ordinary Love" by U2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC3ahd6Di3M)


	6. The Wrenchworks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the corner of Tony's HUD, Berlin's N24 news channel streams live aerial footage of a fight between a man who Tony knows, for a fact, is dead, and a man who Tony knows, for a fact, is in Moscow.
> 
> In the other corner of his HUD, a photo of Steve zonked out on Thor's magic juice pops up with a green "INCOMING CALL" notification.
> 
> "Are you kidding me?" Tony snaps, aggravated, frustrated, and in no way prepared to talk Steve up, down, off, or over this ledge. "No. JARVIS, tell him to go away."
> 
> Steve calls back twice more, before Tony decides to block his ass.
> 
> "Okay, now he's calling me," Rhodey complains. "What do you want me—"
> 
> "Don't answer it," Tony angrily says. This is ridiculous. "JARVIS, location?"
> 
> The Avengers assemble in Berlin to take care of the latest HYDRAgenated mess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: ...I don't think there are any. Enjoy that while it lasts. :)

On a cold day in April 2014, "what the hell happened?" was Tony's first question, lobbed at Romanoff outside a bustling hospital cafeteria. He would have asked Hill, but she was nowhere to be found. Likely.

Romanoff stared at him, a rare sort of shell-shock written all over her face. "We're HYDRA."

Plus details.

Once he got over the little tidbits about Fury being dead, about HYDRA being spic-and-span all right after seventy fucking years, about SHIELD being now-you-see-me-now-you-don't  _gone_ , he asked, "Barnes? As in, James fucking Barnes? The  _other guy_  my dad never shut up about? He's alive?"

And HYDRA.

And Rogers' shining light and everything nice.

Romanoff nodded.

Tony blew out a long breath and scrubbed his hands over his face. "Okay. We've gotta find him. Bring him back. Get him help. Uh…"

Romanoff wasn't saying anything. He dropped his hands, blinked his eyes, and asked, "Right?"

She was so easy to read. He wondered if she knew.

"Your parents…" Natasha said. "It wasn't an accident. It was HYDRA."

Maybe she expected him to be blown backwards, to fall apart, to react in some way. But the police had always suspected; the news outlets had all speculated; and, in his rock-bottom, awful moments, he had read all the ample conspiracy theories running rampant online. Maybe he'd even added some to the mix.

It was weird, though, how she'd linked "we've gotta help Barnes" to "HYDRA killed your parents."

Tony stepped backwards. His body shook for one, maybe two seconds. His crossed arms damn near crushed his lungs. The world turned spotty gray. He didn't know how he spoke, but he did: "Was it him?"

Romanoff tilted her head, everything about her still, and, really, she was easier than an Introduction to Basic Spanish Phrases for the Dumbest Tourist Imaginable book. "We don't know that."

Killed Fury. Put Rogers so far in the hospital that they still didn't know if he was going to be all right. Killed – killed Tony's mom. His dad. And how many others.

Tony turned, the world a lighter gray, hallway spinning, and walked away. Romanoff didn't call out, didn't run after him, didn't do anything.

He walked. Sat in his car. Drove circles. And thought, of all people, of all the fucking people, Obi.

 _How ironic, Tony. How ironic_.  _When I ordered the hit on you._

After he ran a red light in an empty intersection, hands maybe shaking but who knows, he pulled off to the side of the street outside a Five Guys. DC's finest.

 _When I ordered the hit on you_.

Finally, Romanoff texted,  _"Steve made it out of surgery. He's okay."_

Good. That was real good.

He texted back something stupid, something that should never be in writing:  _"If I find him, I'm going to kill him_."

She called, and he let it ring through to voicemail. He listened to it immediately: "No, you're not. You're not that kind of a person. When you get a chance, Steve would love to see you. Don't mind Sam – new guy on the team. Stay in touch, Stark."

In fact, Steve did not love to see Tony. In fact, after Tony visited Steve, and after Tony poisoned that well, Tony didn't see Steve again until two times in 2015, both times when Tony made another ass of himself.

In particular:

"How about some fucking clarity. You let a murderer go.  _Murderer,_ Rogers. If he was anyone else, and not your fucking boyfriend from '43, you wouldn't've thought twice."

Steve stepped back, and Tony realized that they were both done with whatever this had ever the fuck been.

"What's that phrase these days?" Steve baited. "Oh. Right back at you. Did I get that right?"

Tony churned those words over and over and over in his head, and damn near asked JARVIS for a fucking translation. Until it clicked: Tony wouldn't care  _at all,_  if Barnes hadn't killed his parents.

_Fuck._

True.

That wasn't a day where "yeah, maybe we're both right, and I'm sorry" was going to be said.

Before Steve made it out the door, Tony called after him, "No, actually, you got it completely fucking wrong. Enjoy art school." He worked his jaw and added, "Bob."

A+ friend.

They had time to fix it. Steve would calm down and figure out that he needed the Avengers. Tony would be there, ready to be somewhat but mostly not gracious about it.

Not a great plan.

It crumbled with a phone call from Sharon: "HYDRA has Steve. HYDRA… I'm HYDRA."

Swaths of dried, dark red blood streaked across the hardwood floor. It was Sharon's, not Steve's. She was fighting for her life, a messy bullet bleeding her body dry through a hole in her neck.

Steve was…

A dead trail. Flight logs to nowhere. An apartment full of drawings and sketches. Two tablets. Textbooks. A cell phone. A 40" TV set to National Geographic in front of a coffee table with an open notebook and a fine tip Sharpie. The notebook had writing in it: "Google: Ceres, stargazing sites, Grand Canyon, climate change, Antarctica looks neat cool (ha), when did football become more popular than baseball."

Beer in the fridge. A half-devoured fruit tray. Three boxes of pizza that could've been condensed into one. Artisan cupcakes. Produce in the wrong drawer; the asparagus, mushy. The milk was fresh.

That endless, bottomless night, after Rhodey shut down Andrews, after a SHIELD team came through and left with over a dozen listening devices, after it was clear that HYDRA was better at this than they were, Tony sat on Steve's new couch and clutched his hair in his hands.

If he'd…

Tony took and released a deep breath, clearing out his lungs.

If he'd let it go last year. If he hadn't needled Steve until Steve punched back. If he'd…

Romanoff looked sick. "You okay?"

"Oh, yeah. HYDRA's ripping us apart from the inside, but I'm great. 100%."

Of all people,  _Sharon_. She could run circles around most of them. She was their link to pretend-Millennial, finding-myself, hipster-mode Steve. How in the  _fuck_.

"This is what they do. They tear good people apart."

Tony stood up: frustrated, angry, sick, tired, exhausted, fucking god damn  _done_. "This isn't about  _him_. Steve is—"

He couldn't say it. Couldn't say that Rogers was being torn apart. Couldn't say that he'd watched all the old war videos,  _specifically_  to pick out his father and Barnes interacting, and god damn couldn't square the person in those videos, the person from all of his father's stories, with the person from 2014. There wasn't math  _good enough_.

He couldn't say that Rogers had been captured by the same people who'd already perfected an impossible equation.

Romanoff didn't flinch against his shouting. "If Sharon is compromised, we're compromised. Clint won't come; he already said. I'm bringing Barnes in on this."

Not sure if his ears had picked that up quite right, Tony walked forward, head cocked, eyebrows all the way down to his eyeballs. "I'm sorry?"

Romanoff shrugged with a shoulder, infuriating in her composed silence.

HYDRA had Steve, and that was all that mattered. Nothing else, no one else mattered.

Tony sat back down, legs like burnt spaghetti. He rubbed his face with his hands again, but his eyes felt tied to cinderblocks. "The schematic you sent Banner last month. I didn't start on it."

"He's fine without it."

"He can't fly commercially without it. He'll slow you down."

"It'll be fine."

Tony sighed, dropped his hands, and stared at Rogers' handwriting next to a doodle of a giraffe riding a motorcycle through a constellation. Art school for kindergartners, apparently. "You're  _sure_? Sure enough to bet Steve's life?"

She didn't even hesitate. "I don't make bets."

What was he supposed to have done.

For two months, two weeks, and three days, he worked on a hologram for a left metal arm, based on a schematic that Romanoff had found. He ran satellite imagery, audio analyses, simulations, and then anything else Hill asked for, trying to find one hidden person on a planet of eight billion.

He closed himself in his lab and worked on everything and anything, sleeping once a week, maybe. Working. Searching. Developing. Waiting for the moment Hill would tell him that Barnes had flipped on them and turned this search for one into three.

It mostly happened, when Romanoff and Wilson came back, and Barnes stayed in Europe.

"So he bailed."

Romanoff sighed loudly and sent him a warning glare. She didn't challenge the statement.

Hill said: "Helpful. Be helpful."

"I'm sorry – how have I not been?" Tony asked, intentionally missing the point.

"You know what I mean."

Tony did know. Didn't care. "So, Romanoff. Guess you were wrong about that."

Bait.

Another glare. To Romanoff's credit, she looked exhausted. Wrung out. Beyond a limit or two. He should have probably stopped. Probably.

"About what?" Romanoff asked.

Hook.

"Betting Steve's life on HYDRA's favorite toy. That whole thing."

Sinker.

Tony waited, something vicious impatient and thriving. Being right about Barnes  _fixed_  some part of this.

Romanoff licked her lips and nodded. "There's something I need you to do. It'd be helpful."

Leaning back in his chair, left leg poised on his right, Tony spread his hands. "Shoot."

"Go somewhere not here and fuc—"

"HYDRA has Steve," Hill said, angry. "This? Will not bring him back. Was he right about us?"

Romanoff bit the inside of her cheek and gave the slightest shake of her head.

Tony looked down, thinking of that impossible equation. Wondering how nearly three months fit into it. Wondering about what might be left of Rogers to solve.

"We need to be better," Hill finished.

She meant  _do better_. Tony couldn't do a fucking thing in this room, poking at shit with a couple of SHIELD spies. He needed to be in his lab.

He stood up, chair spinning in circles, and walked toward the elevator. He had to pass Romanoff to get there, which was fairly awesome.

He stopped for a short chat: leaned down and whispered, "This is my tower. I  _will not_  fuck myself in  _my_  tower."

"Oh? That's not what Pepper said."

Hill threw her tablet down, loud and hard. Tony walked away quickly, before she decided to shoot one of them.

He didn't leave his lab for days, again. He didn't eat, sleep. He worked on a hologram that its intended recipient would never see. He ran more satellite imagery, audio analyses, simulations, and anything else Hill asked for, no matter how many times he'd already run it. He flat-out ignored Romanoff, another well poisoned.

That impossible equation gnawed at him in different ways, like the impossibility of sixty-nine years: no one finding him, no one knowing, no one realizing. The impossible made improbable, more than a singularity. Mathematically, it could happen to Rogers.

He opened flight logs, mapped the routes and marked off locations. He tracked the logs of all of the original destination points, mapping those routes and marking off those locations. He listened to Rogers' voicemail on a rolling loop for hours and hours, until he could hear Rogers' voice lolling inside his head.

_Hot. Smells like rain, creosote. It's hard to think. It's san—_

A voicemail worth nothing, traceable to nowhere. All it meant was that Rogers was still alive, something a below-average five-year-old could have already surmised.

They had nothing. Three months, and nothing, absolutely nothing, to show.

On a Friday at 1:32 p.m., JARVIS announced, "Sir, a visitor."

Annoyed, Tony flicked his eyes toward his bank of surveillance screens. It was Barnes, hands stuffed into jacket pockets, looking nervous. Good: the tower doors didn't open for everyone.

Barnes glanced up, hard eyes squarely staring into the invisible camera, then looked right back down at the doors.

"What he does he want?"

"Are Natasha or Sam here?" Barnes asked, and, fuck it, he sounded young, young like a kid hoping his friends could come out and play before it got dark. Nevermind that he'd turned 100 that year.

If he turned Barnes away, he'd never hear the end of it. More importantly, it could royally fuck Rogers,  _if_ Barnes had managed to come up with something actionable. Big fucking  _if_ , by the way.

"Let'em in," Tony groused. "Do a weapons check in the elevator."

JARVIS, as always, complied. Tony watched Barnes step inside the elevator, hands at his side, and he watched JARVIS' green scanner run and up and down Barnes' body four times.

Big surprise: JARVIS found a sidearm and four knives. Tony didn't care about those.

"JARVIS, zero in on the left arm. What is that?"

No one had ever said Tony Stark couldn't be petty. Resentful. Retaliatory. Usually, he got a few more kicks out of it, but the way Barnes looked up into the camera, deflated flatter than a decade-old Mylar balloon stuck in a Coachella Valley acacia, and said "it's my  _arm_ " made Tony feel like an asshole.

"Take'em to 90," Tony instructed, then turned the monitors off. "He damn well better have something good."

Barnes had something better than good: he damn near had the location of HYDRA's desert base. That's all they needed from him, whether anyone else liked it or not.

No one did.

And Tony didn't care.

Soon after, Hill said to him, "You're not going. The team is Romanoff, Wilson, and Barnes. We're the back-up. Rhodes will handle airspace and permissions; it's a touchy area."

Tony barely bothered to look away from his computer screen. He knew when he'd lost, and he knew when his own heart wasn't in the fight. "You know he's HYDRA, right."

Her reflection on his screen shook her head, arms crossed. "He's been an active SHIELD operative since September 7, 2014."

Tony spun around in his chair. It was as often as  _never_  that SHIELD, these days, got one over on him. Hill was nowhere near as slippery as Fury, not that she knew it. "You  _recruited_  him?"

"It's been a reliable arrangement."

Fucking spies. All of them.

Hill's stance squared up. "We need you on board."

A zinger crossed his mind—something about a Monopoly game board and wanting to be the dog instead of the thimble—but he couldn't find the energy for it. He missed Rogers' perfect, dumb face too much to throw up walls, and he could feel how close they were to getting him back.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Hill let slip a glimmer of relief. "A private jet to Las Vegas, a four-wheel drive vehicle at the airport, and a cover story. They want to leave tonight."

Tony spun back around in his chair. "JARVIS, you heard the lady. Get it done."

Hill was slow to leave his lab, some jumble of unspoken words left hanging in too-tense air. When the extraction alert came in at 4:32 a.m. PST the next morning, Hill and her teams vanished to Death Valley in the blink of an eye.

Alone, Tony sat in the War Room, waiting. He scrubbed his hands over his oily, bearded face but didn't dare leave long enough for a shower and a proper shave.

Pushed to maximum speed, the Quinjets could do New York, New York to Brevard Creek, Death Valley, California, in 28 minutes. They should be there by 5:00 a.m. PST on the dot. Mentally, he allotted them fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Romanoff, and so that was the magic number: 5:15 a.m. PST.

He paced: hands in his oily hair, then hands around his wool-sleeved arms, then arms swinging back and forth – doing anything to burn the adrenaline through the dragging, crawling minutes.

He should've been out there with them. He still had suits. He was still –

"Want company or no?"

Tony turned to address the voice and didn't hold back. "You read the file. What are we looking at?"

Bruce frowned with a shake of his head. "Oh, no. No. We're not going there."

Not good enough. Tony had never asked for Bruce's protection, and he didn't want it. "Bad?"

Dumb question, but whatever. Whatever.

"That's a…small word," Bruce answered. The frown deepened, as Bruce leaned against the wall by the door. "You ever pluck the legs off a spider?"

Tony shook his head "no" and tried to hide the shaking of his chest. His chest, and he remembered, distinctly, what it was like to wake up in a dark cave with a car battery wired to it. He remembered the abject terror and the helplessness, until he'd found a way to take control. He tried to never think about what it would have been like to not have had that control.

"That's what the file reminded me of," Bruce finished.

"Super," Tony said, so glad Bruce decided to come hang out.

"You asked," Bruce retorted. "Any news?"

Tony glanced at the clock. "Hill's team should be there."

It wasn't two minutes later that a crackle of comm static preceded two glorious words: "Mission successful."

Bruce clapped his hands together. Tony felt like he was breathing for the first time, lightheaded.

 _We have Rogers. We have him_.

"Rogers and Wilson are inbound on Quinjet Eleven. Requesting an additional trauma team be ready in 28 minutes for Quinjet Nine inbound. The injuries are critical."

They already had a medical and trauma counseling team on stand-by for Rogers, which meant either Romanoff or Barnes had been injured. While JARVIS got to it, Tony couldn't help but ask, hoping to hear one name and not the other, "Who?"

"Barnes, multiple GSWs. I'm returning to the enemy base with the secondary team. I'll be in touch. Hill out."

Tony and Bruce shared a look, Bruce more concerned than Tony felt. At least it wasn't Romanoff or Wilson, and at least Rogers was safe.

Rogers was  _safe_  and was going to be home in the time it took to get take-out. That was a win, no matter the loss.

The gurney that rolled off Quinjet Nine had an unrecognizable body on it, save for the silver metal arm strapped to the side of the mattress. The rest was shrouded by injuries, blood, medical equipment, and the sheer speed by which the medical team pushed it off the landing pad.

The electrocardiograph monitor fluttered with a rapid  _blipblipblipblipblip_ , followed by the calm statement of, "Blood pressure is bottoming out again. He's back in v-fib." Tony watched one of the doctors or nurses or whoever the hell he'd hired jump atop the gurney and begin manual chest compressions.

Next to Tony, Bruce muttered, "Holy shit."

 _Clang, clang, clang_.

Behind them, Romanoff stepped down the jet's ramp, as worse for wear as Tony had ever seen: hair disheveled; dirt and blood streaked across her face, neck and arms; clothing ragged. The worst, of course, was her demeanor: shell-shocked.

Nothing rattled Romanoff. God damn nothing.

"Hey, hey. You okay?" Bruce asked, in a gentle, ironic way that almost made some sort of warped sense coming from the Hulk.

Her eyes jerked Bruce's way, and even Tony, whom Pepper had once called "as emotionally intelligent as a blob of goopy gum stuck on a sidewalk," noticed something like rawness there.

"Of course," she lied – and badly, for a spy.

"He'll be all right," Bruce said, and, wow, maybe Bruce had witnessed a different spectacle just now.

Romanoff shook her head "no." "He… They couldn't get him back on the way here. Where's Steve?"

"Inbound in about five," Tony responded.

"Be ready," Romanoff warned, but not the way Tony expected. He expected the warning to be more "he's bad in shape," but her tone spoke more of something dangerous. "He shot Barnes."

That not only didn't compute, it destroyed the entire fucking computation. Fruitlessly, Tony looked down the corridor, empty now. Everything had cycloned into the operating room, two floors down.

"What, on accident?" Bruce asked, and, yeah, Tony could envision an accidental something or other happening. Something heroic while fighting off HYDRA and busting out of the base, right?

Romanoff looked Bruce in the eyes. "No. HYDRA kept busy."

Bruce huffed out a laugh, the way he did when the world was disappointing him again. "C'mon, it's  _Steve_. He runs the fan—" His face crumpled. "HYDRA used it."

Romanoff's nod was slow. "Be ready."

Quinjet Eleven touched down two minutes earlier than expected. Even after Romanoff's warning, Tony wasn't ready for who stepped out of the cargo hold.

Wilson—face bruised and bloodied as per the theme of the day, and his clothing  _literally_ caked in dried blood—had one hand on Steve's elbow and the other around Steve's torso. Three medical staff trailed behind them, one carrying a very obvious syringe.

Steve's hand—fingers inflamed red and blackened with dirt—shielded his eyes from the late morning sun. Under that hand, Tony noticed a busted nose, flaking blood caught in the thick beard covering his chin and neck. His bare arms were striped with dirt-crusted cuts and burns, bruises of every color, and healed scars overlapping other scars and lacerations.

 _Holy shit_.

Steve limped down the ramp, Wilson somehow supporting the bulk of Captain America's weight.

"You said I could sleep," Steve croaked through deeply cracked lips and a voice long gone.

"You're home now," Wilson replied. He waved Bruce and Tony back with two quick swipes of his hand. "You can sleep for a week."

"I killed him. You  _said_."

Bruce tensed up. "Remember that 'always angry' thing?"

Because, yeah, there was some aggression radiating off Steve. Tony was very suddenly aware that no one on this landing pad quite had the natural ability to take Steve down, and – this was not the way he'd imagined the homecoming would go.

"A couple more seconds, man," Sam cajoled.

Steve's hand dropped, and his eyes—somehow red and black, puffy and thin, all at the same time—peeled open against the sunlight. Tony reached up to his own head and felt around for sunglasses, before remembering that he hadn't worn any that morning.

"Welcome back, Cap," Tony tried, as glib as he could pretend to be. "Love the beard. Do you like plaid? I don't have any, but I could get some. You know, finish the look."

He felt three pairs of incensed eyes try to light him on fire. That was the one superpower none of them were allowed to have – Avengers Tower policy.

Steve was Steve, no matter what HYDRA had tried to do, and Tony wouldn't change how he treated him.

Steve didn't have an acid retort for Tony's jabs. Steve didn't say anything to any of them.

Steve and Wilson limped further down the walkway, Romanoff cautiously moving out of their way. When they passed Tony, Tony consciously stopped himself from gagging at the smell of old blood, new blood, and unwashed, burnt skin.

"Sleep," Steve rasped.

"A little bit longer, and I promise," Wilson answered, then looked at Bruce and Tony. "Natasha got hurt, by the way, in case she didn't tell you guys."

Steve didn't catch the last part, apparently. "I killed him. I get sleep."

"I know. You can sleep in a little bit. I promise."

A wheelchair and another medical team came to the end of the walkway, and Wilson somehow coaxed Steve into it without an argument. In fact, if Tony had to guess, he'd say that Steve actually fell asleep the moment his ass hit the seat, judging by the way his body folded.

Steve and Wilson were both surrounded by the medical team and whisked away, down the corridor and to the medical wing.

"So, when we thought this nightmare was over, we were actually just getting started?" Bruce commented.

"He's home," Tony said, having long ago mastered the art of the bullshit deal, only he didn't know who he was trying to fool. "Home" wouldn't mean shit to Steve, if it meant… "Barnes has to live."

Steve was the person who went ballistic, if someone said Barnes' name with a slightly negative tone. Steve was not the person more concerned about a nap, when Barnes was barely alive. In a couple days, Steve would be enough of himself to crumble under the weight of what he'd done.

Barnes had to live.

"What happened to you?" Tony asked Romanoff, before he forgot.

She shook her head dismissively. "Shoulder wound, through-and-through. It's fine."

He told her to get it looked at anyway, and Bruce left the landing pad with her.

Tony hung behind and watched the hydraulic system raise Quinjet Nine into the hangar, and, of all things, wondered how the hell they'd ended up with three jets all numbered—

JARVIS' voice filled the landing zone. "Sir, you are needed in Operating Room Number Two."

"The hell?" He'd no sooner said the words than he realized: the arm posed a problem to non-HYDRA modern medicine.

Bingo.

"He has what we think is an Internal Cardiac Defibrillator somewhere in his left arm," Dr. Eicher explained. She even pointed at a completely worthless x-ray of the left side of a body – but it did show leads winding through the heart's ventricles. "He's not stable enough for a lead extraction from the heart. Can you turn it off from the source?"

The schematics he'd seen hadn't been anywhere near detailed, and they definitely hadn't pointed to an ICD anywhere in the arm. It would take too long to try to find it, which meant he'd need –

"Tony, he'll die. I know how—"

"I'm  _thinking_ ," Tony snapped, as if, Christ, he was going to let the guy  _die_. As if he was going to let Steve live with that. "It'll take too long to find it. I'll have to cut power to the whole thing."

Eicher nodded, and, as he tried to leave to get equipment, she grabbed his arm. "His chest's cut open. Can you handle seeing it?"

"Yeah, sure" was his answer, because there was no choice: save Barnes, save Rogers.

Nothing could have prepared him for it, anyway.

Neck secured in a precautionary brace; eyes taped shut; breathing tube down his throat; naked, scarred skin down to his upper hips and then only a white blanket, with all sorts of wires and bloody drainage tubes everywhere – no big deal. Tony could barely see his face, and, really, if it wasn't for the metal arm, Tony might not have even recognized him.

The haunting shit was the red-saturated sheet under his body. His chest  _was_  cut open, straight down the middle, and kept splayed by bone spreaders. The left-side rib cage was  _gray_ and riveted with screws. A surgeon had her hand inside the chest cavity, massaging the heart, while three others and a handful of nurses attacked the bullet wounds.

"Welcome to the party, Mr. Stark," one of the surgeons said. Tony thought her name was Milojevic, the lead surgeon. "We appreciate your assistance."

Tony nodded brief acknowledgement.

"Blood pressure stabilizing. Heart rate and respiratory stable. Oxygen saturation still remarkably low."

"Mac, source that low saturation. Something's going on. Embolism, maybe?"

"Well, that'd be a  _great_  party favor."

Tony stopped listening and quickly set up next to the left arm. Behind his uncomfortable surgical mask, Tony breathed, "Shit."

He'd never touched this arm before in his life.

It'd touched his parents. His mom.

He could let him die. He could fire everyone in this room. He could pretend to not know how to hook up to the arm. He could take a scalpel and stab a gaping hole in his heart. He could make good on a threat.

Tony sat on a metal stool, woke up his laptop, and got to work.

The primary access port was near the middle of the bicep. Tony peeled off the first two plates to reveal an intricacy of glowing blue wires and circuitry. On paper, it was an intriguing design; in person, it was impressive work.

He removed another three plates and found the access port. The schematics had provided the type of plug-in, for which he'd already created an adapter and a software program. Tony plugged in, and his laptop screen inundated with lines of codes and commands, all languages he spoke.

Tony attacked.

His fingers sped over the keyboard, switching between coding languages and sending dozens of commands that would hopefully streamline this process. Line by line, the code simplified, but not by much.

The arm was an incredible piece of work in and of itself, let alone when considering the software behind it. HYDRA's scientists had managed to seamlessly replace tendons, ligaments, nerves, and blood vessels with manmade code – and that,  _that_ , was –

Tony swallowed too hard. The space between his jaw and earlobe cracked. His fingers stopped.

It was like he was –

Hacking a human being.

He looked at the arm—up the bicep to the top of the shoulder down the jagged scar line where flesh fused with metal. Beyond that, he could still glimpse the screw-riveted, metal-covered ribs; from a simple engineering standpoint, it made perfect sense to reinforce the skeleton against the extraordinary physical demands of the arm.

The only problem was that people weren't  _engineered_. People weren't  _hackable_. And yet.

Tony's mouth suddenly became cotton-dry.

"Got a bleeder down here. Good news is no apparent damage to the spinal cord. Do need some suction."

"How's his blood pressure? Do we need a transfusion yet?"

"Stable but low. No."

"No? Well, shit."

"Oxygen saturation decreasing."

"Mac, source it."

Tony blinked and looked back at the screen. His fingers started moving across the keyboard again.

He knew the command line he was searching for; it was only a matter of finding it. He wrote and deployed a simple algorithm to eliminate unrelated code – and was still left with hundreds of lines to sort through.

It might actually be faster to dismantle the arm. Actually, it might be faster to build a br—

The fingers twitched.

Tony hadn't done anything.

"He's finally playing ball with us, at least. It's been a good, what, ten minutes?"

"Maybe seven."

"Ooh, lucky sevens."

Tony glanced over at Barnes' right hand and saw those fingers curling into a fist. "Uh, is he awa—"

Barnes' right arm came up, pulling with it IV lines, wires, and leads. The nurse on that side caught the arm and pushed it down, firmly gentle but panic scribbled on her face.

Barnes' legs came up, bent at the knees.

Alarms  _screeched_. The electrocardiograph went nuts; Barnes' heart rate exploded, the numbers climbing, alerts ringing.

His back arched up, curving in a way that could spill his guts onto the operating room floor. The doctor previously holding his heart in her hand hopped back, bloody gloved hands held in the air.

The left arm  _whirred_  and reached for the endotracheal tube. Tony grabbed the arm and pulled, surprised at how easily it came back down to the table. With no muscles, all it should have taken was a thought to lock in the motion.

Tony didn't think Barnes was going to let the arm be moved like that again. He had to do something.

"Bucky! Stop! You're safe! You're safe!" Tony shouted, not knowing if the guy was even able to listen through the drugs – or if his voice would even be a welcome sound. "We're not HYDRA. Romanoff and Wilson brought you here. You're safe. But you have to stop moving. Stop moving."

The burly nurse holding down Barnes' legs yelped, broke a sweat, and put his whole upper body over Barnes' still-struggling legs.

"Get him anesthetized!  _Now_!"

Tony earned himself a gold star with the left arm theory: without muscle, it only took a series of small, stubborn thoughts:  _up_ ,  _grab, squeeze_. Even effectively blind, Barnes easily found Tony's convenient throat and locked it into an agonizing strangle-hold.

Tony screamed while he still could, his own hands coming up to uselessly wrap around Barnes' immovable wrist. He managed to scrape out "Bucky, stop, stop, stop!"

The next thing Tony knew, he was half-flying, half-stumbling across the OR. He crashed into a supply cart: metal  _clanging_ , plastic  _thudding_ , and all kinds of  _shit_  raining down onto his head. Something painful smacked into his forehead.

His ears rang with a high-pitched  _wailing_. He was faintly aware of holding his throat and sucking down gulps of oxygen. The room was black, until he opened his eyes to the white brightness.

The entire medical team had swarmed over Barnes. The monitors flashed red, numbers ticking down, down, down. The heartbeat spikes of the ECG were shorter and less frequent – a complete turnaround from the race it'd been running moments ago.

Shorter. Less frequent. Dwindling down.

"No," Tony said. "No, do something. Do something!"

The high-pitched wailing turned to a flat, monotone beep.

Flatline.

Flatline meant dead, done, deceased, everyone go home, find a new friend. TV got it wrong.

Flatline meant Steve killed his best friend. It meant Steve wasn't coming home. It meant the world had irrevocably changed for the worst.

The burning inside Tony's lungs signaled to him that he had forgotten to breathe.

A surgical tech held out his hand. Tony automatically took it, thoughtless. Blood dripped onto his forearm.

"Your forehead is lacerated, Mr. Stark."

"Is he— What happened?" Tony demanded. "Explain that."

"I don't know, Mr. Stark. Your forehead, Mr. Stark."

Tony ignored the tech. The team hadn't stopped working. He saw a nurse squeezing a bag and two doctors still working inside the chest cavity.

"Suction. Somebody turn off those alarms, huh."

"Metoprolol, 500 mg. Another round of epi."

"500?"

"500. He's a big guy."

The left hand clenched into a fist. The ECG  _blipped_ , its readings spiking.

"There he is," Milojevic said, totally unsurprised. "Welcome back, James. Please don't do that again."

"Suction. Lots of suction. Wasn't ready for that."

"It's ARDS. We need to re-intubate. The bag won't do it."

"Talk about a gift that keeps on giving."

"Mr. Stark," Milojevic called, "how about that arm?"

Yeah. Right. He stepped forward and picked his laptop off the floor. He tried not to watch what the team was doing, but he couldn't help but ask, "What the hell happened?"

"He pulled out the ET tube," Milojevic replied, dually focused on her work and, stupidly, on answering Tony's question. "And also managed to gift us with a medial rupture of his aorta. We need the ICD off and you out."

"Blood pressure is approaching critical again."

"Yeah, well, that's kind of a good thing right now."

Tony didn't ask any other questions. While a nurse cleaned and sutured his forehead, he searched lines of codes for the proverbial "off switch," hyperaware of every minute that ticked by. When he blinked, he saw remnants of the numbers and letters, and he knew he was going to be dreaming about this nightmare for a long time to come.

It would have to get in line behind the others.

At 10:53 a.m., Tony found the "off" switch and flipped it. He exhaled, a bit of his internal stress ball unraveling. The morbid asshole that lived inside his head thought  _it's really a dis_ _ **arm**_ _switch_.

The ECG's reading fluttered with a handful of close-together, too-fast beats. Almost as quickly as it happened, the readings returned to what had been counting as normal for the past few hours.

"That was me," Tony quickly announced, although he'd never expected that to happen. "It's off."

Milojevic didn't look up at him. "Thank you, Mr. Stark. We'll keep taking it from here."

Tony gathered his equipment, baffled more than relieved. How the hell did the disarm switch affect the heart –

There was one obvious option.

On a hunch that made him want to hurl, Tony instructed, "Don't pull those leads out of his heart. You'll kill him."

His next project was, hopefully, finding the ICD and all the other inevitable, nasty surprises.

In the hallway, Tony sat his laptop and equipment on a green, padded chair, tore off and balled up his surgical mask and disposable scrubs, and then leaned himself against the wall.

His head throbbed and his neck ached. Between obsessive thoughts about Steve and horrifying, permanent images of Barnes burned into his mind, the only other thing Tony could think about was a tall decanter of aged Scotch.

What a fucking morning.

His phone  _beeped_. Tony thought about leaving it and going to put his head down on his lab desk.

He didn't. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and found a video file from Hill, along with a text message: " _Contents may help focus Rogers' recovery. Be sitting down."_

 _Fucking Christ_ , Tony thought. Scotch or whiskey, either way.

Was it too late to quit SHIELD?

"Hey."

Tony palmed his phone and yawned in Bruce's face. "How's Rogers?"

"Sedated and still being evaluated for injuries," Bruce replied. "Eicher's writing a freaking novel. Barnes?"

That was a good question with a lot of answers. Tony shook his head – and flinched when that movement sent stabs of pain through his forehead.

"What happened there?"

Tony popped his eyebrows up and waved a hand in the air. "Don't ask."

Bruce wasn't one to push. "Some preliminary bloodwork is available, for both of them. Want to look over it with me?"

"In a bit, maybe," Tony said, his thoughts drifting back to Hill's video.

"Okay," Bruce replied, his tone bordering on questioning. "Get some sleep, Tony. Since you won't, you know where to find me."

Once Bruce was out of earshot, Tony asked JARVIS, "Where are Romanoff and Wilson?"

"They are both in Ms. Romanoff's suite" came the answer.

Sleeping, probably.

Hill was in California, and Rhodey was in DC. No eavesdroppers. Tony could go anywhere in the entire tower to watch the video, but only one place, of all places, felt right, for a reason he couldn't articulate.

He went to the empty, soundproofed observation deck of Operating Room Number Two, powered his laptop back on, clicked on Hill's secured link, and pressed  _play_.

It showed Rogers standing still near the back of a concrete room. He wore the same clothes and had the same injuries from this morning.

Tony cupped his hand over his mouth. He knew what this might be.

"Paint something beautiful," an unknown, tinny voice said.

"Steve! Are you al…" Barnes. "Steve?"

Tony heard fear in that voice.

Rogers raised a gun and fired three times, then came the sounds of metal ricocheting off metal.

"What'd they tell you, Steve? What'd they make you see?" Barnes came into view, as he kicked Steve into the wall. He twisted Steve's gun away and dismantled it. "Find another way—"

Expression hateful, Rogers backhanded Barnes and kicked him hard enough to fling him backwards into the air.

Tony hit  _pause_ , tossed the laptop onto a chair, and stood up.

Hands in his hair, Tony stared down into the OR. He had a bird's eye view of the damage Hill wanted him to watch happen on a video. His eyes crept to the vitals monitors: oxygen finally in the green, blood pressure still in red, and heart rate in yellow. One of the doctors rocked on his toes as he worked.

Tony spun around, decision made in a split second. He pressed "play" on the laptop and turned back to the window, stinging forehead pressed against the glass.

A crashing noise. Grunts that sounded like Rogers.

"You were in kindergarten; I was in first grade." Barnes. He sounded in control. Spoiler alert: the ripped-apart body down below gave away the ending. "The first kid I punched out for you was Walter Murray."

Unintelligible, desperate screams, all Rogers. Tony closed his eyes.

"We've known each other since 19-fucking-22. We grew up two blocks apart. You gonna let it end like this?"

_Bang!_

_Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!_ Tony counted a magazine of shots. He didn't know how many had found their target.

Another scream from Rogers.

Tony's leg jerked, his body wanting to turn and see what was happening on the video. He pulled away from the window, hands clasped on the back of his neck, and paced.

"On the helicarrier, you let me almost kill you. I'll never forgive you for that."

 _Funny way of showing it_.

"Remember hotwiring that Mercedes in Frankfurt? All we did was argue. It was pitch black outside, and the fucking 303rd was bombing the fuck out of us. We weren't even supposed to  _be there_ , and we were 100 fucking miles from the extraction point. We  _finally_ got it to start, and you—you fucking idiot—you drove it straight into a wall."

Barnes laughed at the end, every word dripping with unmistakable fondness. He sounded like an A+ friend, and he sounded like –

He sounded like a real person. Not a story from his dad, a bundle of platitudes from Steve, a folder full of typewritten words, or a malevolent ghost concocted by the angry fears and stale wounds of a teenager long far gone.

"That wasn't you." Steve's gravel voice barely made the tape.

_What._

The audio filled with white noise for several minutes. Tony could make out the sounds of hand-to-hand combat: shuffling, skin hitting skin, fast breaths, groans. Then, finally, a shouted cry – but not from Steve.

Steve hissed, "Does it feel good? Do you like it?"

A scream. Not Rogers. Another cry.

"Stop! Stop screaming!"

It was the loudest Steve had been the entire time. He sounded unhinged, irrational, and, worst of all, desperate.

"We laughed." Barnes, breathless. "We sat in that fucking car, and we laughed until we couldn't breathe. It was March 22, 1944. There isn't a world without you in it. Come back, Steve."

"Bucky." Steve was almost amiable. "You sound like you used to."

 _Trap, it's a trap_ , Tony thought, almost forgetting that he couldn't control what was happening.

Of course it'd been a trap. Barnes screamed again.

"What if I cut you? Will it feel  _good_? Will you  _like it_?"

Tony kept pacing, mind circling around the audio, around Steve from this morning—not even two hours after this had happened—and around the person barely hanging on in the operating room below him.

The arm  _whirred_. Steve made a pained, gasping sound.

"I walked into this base, knowing what could happen. I don't blame you. I'm not mad. I'm good with this. Don't let HYDRA have anything more than they've already taken. Don't think about this."

Tony stood still. His hands fell to his sides. He locked his jaw.

"Trust me. I won't." Steve.

"Then finish it. 'Cause I'm with you, 'til the end of the line."

Tony tensed, bracing himself for the inevitable gunshots. They didn't come. Steve yelled, "You've taken  _everything!_  You can't have that!" and then "I'm going to kill you I'm going to fucking kill you!"

Frantic coughs and pleas cut through Steve's yells. Words like "stop" and "Steve."

Tony went back to the glass window, arms wrapped around himself now. The colors on the monitors had flipped around. That one doctor wasn't bouncing anymore. Internal defibrillators that looked like tongs were out.

On the video, Tony heard groans and coughs.

Then silence, stretching; Tony's stomach, curling. He knew how it ended. He was looking at it.

"I didn't mean what I said in Kraków last year." Barnes' voice was raspier than Steve's. "I didn't mean it. I'm sorry."

Another stretch of silence.

"Steve?"

_Bang!_

Wet, thick coughs.

_Bang!_

_Bang!_

The audio bled to static.

Later, Tony would try to watch the video again but only manage to watch the timestamp run through numbers for fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds. To be exact, 14:35.02 was how long it took for Barnes to let Steve kill him.

Barnes' vitals crawled into the single-digits, and his god damn right arm came up again. The anesthesiologist shook his head, sweat running down his forehead: an  _I don't fucking know_  if Tony'd ever seen one.

Medicine was precise and pre-calculated; if X happened, do Y. People like Steve and Barnes were the proverbial wrenches in the works, the grit in the oiled machine. Their bodies didn't react to medicine the expected way.

Tony wasn't a doctor, but he was a scientist, and it didn't take one who studied rockets to figure out that those doctors down there were playing a blindfolded game of Pin the Tail.

The vitals crashed again. Tony didn't look away.

The impossibility of a person down there wasn't the person who'd killed his parents. The person down there was somehow decent.

A year later, almost to the day, at some time past three in the morning, Tony rode an elevator inside the new SHIELD headquarters. It glided to a soft stop, and a computer he'd programmed announced "Subfloor Four" in a sugary female voice.

The doors slid open.

Tony hesitated, considered going back up, but made himself step into a cold, gray, bright, sterile hallway. They could've done better with the design down here. Something less on-the-nose.

The doors closed. The empty car glided up.

With a purpose he didn't have, Tony strode down the cold, gray hallway, passing gray, steel doors, one after another after another, until he came to a set of locked double-doors. He glanced up at the optic recognition system and heard an expected  _click_.

He pushed through the doors and stepped into the morgue.

The lights were already on. The drawer was already open. Steve was already sitting with the body: shoulders hunched, head low, his hands clutching a dead person.

Tony wracked his brain for a single fucking thing to say.  _"Don't let him thaw out – it'd be pretty gross"_  crossed his mind. Sometimes Tony hated himself.

When his parents had died, he'd only wanted to be left alone. He hadn't wanted to talk or see people. Instead of any of that, he'd inherited a multinational weapons company and friends who'd only seen a kid guarding a cache of wealth with a Styrofoam sword.

Tony grabbed a stool, set it beside Steve, and sat.

After Death Valley, with his right hand encased in red and gold armor, Tony had escorted Steve to a mutually safe place in the Tower – something akin to a psych ward. Halfway there, barefoot and broken, Steve had begged, "Take care of him. Please, Tony." All Steve had needed to hear was, "I will," and Tony had given him that, meaning it.

_I will._

Tony hadn't kept the promise.

Briefly, Tony glanced down and saw everything he didn't want to see. The autopsy incisions made it real: no miracle, no last minute save, no coming back, find a new friend.

Somewhere along the line, SHIELD had so significantly failed.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, Steve and Tony sat in silence, and Tony thought that, once upon a time, all of this could have not been this.

***

In the corner of Tony's HUD, Berlin's N24 news channel streams live aerial footage of a fight between a man who Tony knows, for a fact, is dead, and a man who Tony knows, for a fact, is in Moscow.

"Hill, tell me you know what's going on," Tony demands.

"Negative," Hill responds. "We still have his body. Proceed with caution."

 _Fucking great_.

"I don't know, you guys, this one is looking like ours," Rhodey says, right after the Barnes in Berlin kicks a car into a group of HYDRA soldiers, and then brutally, efficiently shoots enough enemy combatants that the footage cuts to the newsroom.

"JARVIS, switch to satellite," Tony says. "Make it good."

"Repositioning satellites now."

Once upon a time, Tony had made a promise:  _I will_. This time, he's going to damn well keep it. Not being able to see what's happening in Berlin isn't so much helping. " _Now_ , JARVIS."

"Tony, relax," Rhodey chides. "He's got this."

Also not so much helpful. "Oh, yeah? Didn't end so well last time."

Nothing Tony has seen says that it will end any better this time.

From Moscow to Berlin, it's 1,004 miles. At Mach 4, both of their suits can push about 3,000 miles per hour – a solid twenty minutes of flight. They've already been in the air for five. If Barnes can hold out for fifteen more minutes, the whole thing is over.

Tony thinks of the video from Death Valley: 14:35.02. He'd never thought to ask:  _why did you let him do it?_ It's not like it takes a genius.

Tony's HUD feed cuts from news channel talking heads to a high-def, aerial satellite feed. The thing about spy satellites, particularly ones owned and operated by Stark Industries, is that they're always good. This one gets as close to the ground as about ten meters – low enough for detail, high enough to capture the action.

What Tony sees sends him further into a proverbial tailspin. Barnes knocks away Steve's shield and  _just fucking stands there_.

"Move, damn it!" Tony shouts.

Steve launches toward him, blood bursting from his arm, stomach, and thigh. The bullets don't stop Steve in the least. Barnes whacks him in the head with the rifle – and, what, no, that can't be all that Barnes has in his toolkit.

Barnes is holding back, because he thinks it's the real deal Steve Rogers. He's going to get himself killed,  _again_. (Again again.)

"Maria, get Barnes on the books," Rhodey requests. It's a good call. "Make him an Avenger, or he's gonna go down for this."

Because whacking the shit out of Captain America in the middle of Berlin doesn't score you the good kind of points.

"He has been since Brazil.  _If_  it's him," Maria responds. "Your airspace is cleared. Shut this down."

Black smoke consumes the sat feed and every bit of useable imagery. Before Tony can get a word out to JARVIS, JARVIS announces, "No satellite imagery is currently available. Repositioning satellites has failed."

Tony doesn't argue the point. There's nothing to argue, and he knows it.

_I will._

He pushes his suit faster, rerouting power to thrusters, and ticks his speed up to Mach 4.3. It will net him mere seconds, but, sometimes, seconds can make all the difference.

In the other corner of his HUD, a photo of Steve zonked out on Thor's magic juice pops up with a green "INCOMING CALL" notification.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Tony snaps, aggravated, frustrated, and in no way prepared to talk Steve up, down, off, or over this ledge. "No. JARVIS, tell him to go away."

Steve calls back twice more, before Tony decides to block his ass.

"Okay, now he's calling me," Rhodey complains. "What do you want me—"

"Don't answer it," Tony angrily says. This is  _ridiculous_. "JARVIS, location?"

"Passing Vilnius, Lithuania."

Ten more minutes. There's no way.

_I will._

"We'll get there, Tony," Rhodey says, still trying to be helpful and still failing.

One way or another, they  _will_ get there. Tony's more concerned about what they'll find when they do and how he's supposed to tell Steve that Tony let his best friend die. Again. (Again again.)

All Steve had ever wanted, from day fucking one, was for them to take care of his friend. All he'd gotten was let down.

Not again.

 _I will_.

The sat image worsens – more smoke, blacker, thicker. A car or rubber or both are burning. The satellite cameras don't have a chance of cutting through the smog.

When they do get there, they could find anything.

"JARVIS, pull up a map." Rhodey. "Where are we now?"

A topographical map pops into Tony's HUD. Past Warsaw. Four more minutes.

The sat feed strays from the smoke. It hovers far over an in-flight news helicopter with a person hanging from one of its landing skids. Tony squints, doublechecking the image.

It's Barnes, with Steve nowhere in sight, and it's Barnes punching a couple holes through the helicopter's hull, before disappearing inside.

"He knows there's a door, right?" Rhodey asks.

Tony has no idea what the hell Barnes knows or doesn't know, except that Steve must be in the cockpit. It's the only scenario that makes sense.

The helicopter gains shaky altitude, its flight less than smooth and narrowly dodging buildings. The important thing is that it  _does_ gain altitude, rapidly, and enough to put it far above the skyline.

"A minute thirty."

And then the helicopter plummets. Nosedives. Careens downward.

Tony stops breathing. Rhodey's out of platitudes.

It keeps going down, faster and further, as if no one is at the controls. Maybe they're both dead. Maybe it doesn't matter, because the helicopter is going to smash into the city.

Tony and Rhodey enter Berlin city limits, and, against everything his heart wants to do, Tony reduces speed to below Mach 1.

JARVIS sets a waypoint, and Tony follows it at maximum safe speed, lowering his altitude to street level. He weaves between buildings, zips through streets, buzzes past cars, soars over screaming people, and intersects the Spree.

_I will._

He makes a bone-bending right-angle turn and rockets straight up the Spree, sprays of water surging behind him.

"Kill the feed, JARVIS," Tony orders.

He sees it in the best high-def there is: real life.

The helicopter veers around a building, its survivable angle of entry gone. It's going to hit the river sideways too fast for anyone, serum or not, to survive. No question.

Repulsors maxed, Tony hugs the curve of the river, gaining altitude an increment at a time. His eyes barely leave the helicopter.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he mutters.

_I will._

He times the interception impeccably: thirty feet above the river, the nose caught in both armored hands, reverse thrusters already engaged to account for—

Glass shatters.

A body hits his upper chest.

He hears a  _crunch_.

Dark red droplets splatter against his helmet.

"No!" Tony shouts.

The body flops to Tony's right and falls, legs and arms limp. Tony sees the left arm flicker back and forth between flesh and metal.

 _Barnes_.

Barnes splashes into the river. His body plunges under the choppy surface, gone within seconds.

"Rhodey, get—" Tony shouts.

Rhodey's already diving toward the river, a long five seconds out. "JARVIS, I need depth."

"Depth map displayed. The river is deep enough for your current angle and speed."

"Start scanning, JARVIS," Tony orders. "Find him."

"Scans running to detect both blood and the metal composite of his left arm."

 _Fuck_.

Tony watches Rhodey cut through the water – and then remembers that he's holding onto a helicopter, its blades spinning and engine smoking.

Tracks of blood run down his helmet.

He hadn't considered  _basic fucking physics_.

"JARVIS, where the hell is he?" Rhodey.

"Still scanning."

"Do better. I can't see shit down here."

When he'd created Iron Man, Tony hadn't banked on SHIELD. He hadn't banked on Steve Rogers coming back from the Arctic dead (great name for a band). He hadn't banked on the Avengers, or on his dad's other perfect man crush coming back from the great Alpian dead ( _not_ a great name for a band). He hadn't fucking  _prepared_.

"Sir, your heart rate is above normal and rising."

It's beating out of his god damned chest, because there's no way he's telling Steve, or Romanoff, or Wilson that he killed Barnes. No. Way.

"Just find him," Rhodey says. "C'mon, JARVIS. Tony, are you good?"

Tony blinks, breathes, snaps out of it. Unhappy helicopter: in his hands.

Tony fires a repulsor beam to kill the engines and rotors. He engages his forward thrusters and carries the helicopter the hundred or so feet to the concrete river front. The metal scrapes and skids across a walkway and a slit of grass, down and neutralized.

Preoccupied with the idea that he's killed Steve's shining light and everything nice, Tony leaves the helicopter and flies back out over the river, torn between waiting or diving in. "Rhodey, do you have him?"

"Colonel Rhodes – three meters to your right, above you one meter. Location marked orange."

"JARVIS, cut me a feed," Tony demands. "Now."

A square panel pops up in the left corner of his HUD. The feed is night-vision green, with small, artificially-bright debris floating through murky water. Rhodey blasts toward the orange marker.

After a few seconds, a green outline fills the panel: Barnes drifting on his back, while his head, legs, and arms hang limp. A cloud of light green seeps from his head, leg, and arm.

"Injuries?" Rhodey.

That's the wrong question; Tony would have asked if there were vitals.

The outline of Barnes' body highlights red with areas of injury, of which there's a fucking lot. His vitals pop up on the right corner of the HUD: respiration, 0; pulse, 40; temperature, 99.

"Heart rate below normal. No respiration detected. Lungs are fluid-filled. C4-5, C5-6 fractures. Open skull fracture. Rib fractures. Multiple gunshot wounds."

Tony's stomach somersaults. "I broke his neck?"

"I got him, Tony. We've got him. Focus."

Rhodey surges the final few meters to Barnes' drifting body. Tony watches his hand slide under Barnes' neck and his other pull Barnes' body in tight.

"JARVIS, lock my hand; don't let it move. Best traum—"

A step ahead, Unfallkrankenhaus Berlin pops up, marked orange on a city map. It's only five mil—

A blinding flash of blue thrusts Tony forward several feet. He compensates with his repulsors and spins around, ready to fight.

Instead, he freezes.

It really is Steve: his face, his hair, his build. He's limping away from the helicopter: arm broken, right knee blood-soaked and noticeably wobbly. Four soldiers dressed head-to-toe in black, geared to the teeth, surround and walk with him.

Nope. Wherever it is they think they're going, it's not going to be that easy.

Behind him, Rhodey blasts out of the water and heads east toward the hospital. Tony doesn't turn to look. In the corner of his HUD, he can still see what Rhodey's seeing: the overcast sky, Berlin's orange and gray rooftops, and Barnes' bloody face.

Tony blasts forward and over not-Steve and his HYDRA friends, then lands several feet in front of them, intentionally hard enough that the concrete craters under his feet.

Both hands primed to fire at them, Tony stands his ground. "Yeah, no. You can stop right there."

Sometimes, people listen. Some other times, people don't.

This is one of those other times.

One of the soldiers taps something under his black tactical jacket, and all of them— _all of them_ —vanish in a swirling, transient flash of blue.

That flash of blue had black wisps around the edges. Curls of blue, darker toward the middle. Black in the center. Like something else he's seen: a Tesseract portal.

***

Outside the Emergency Department's waiting room, Natasha trots up behind Tony's retreating frame. "Is it him?"

Tony stops walking. A cup of vending machine coffee in his hand, he turns around, face weary.

Instead of making up some pop-culture zinger that might win him all of the day's available cool points, he shakes his head and responds, "I didn't talk to him. I don't know."

Natasha doesn't know what to do with that.

"I caught the helicopter, and he flew out of it. He hit me. He fell." Tony's eyes grow wide, his face muscles taut, his body language suddenly guarded. He shrugs and shakes his head, nervous and trying to hide it. "It might be bad."

On auto-pilot, Natasha says, "He's made it through worse."

"Yeah, sure."

Natasha somehow musters a small smile, one that pities Tony's naivete in the shadow of their world. "He was built to survive worse."

Tony's nervousness evaporates, replaced by righteous anger. Natasha lets him step into her space, then calmly looks up into his eyes.

"People aren't  _built_."

She lifts an eyebrow and a shoulder to go along with it. "We were. Sit down.  _Calm_  down."

He at least sits. She chooses the chair next to him and picks up a crinkled back copy of  _Elle_.

Tony's leg bounces, and Natasha wishes Rhodes had stayed.

After a while, Tony asks, "How's Rogers?"

"We sent Sam to get him," Natasha answers, neutral. The truth is that Tony and Rhodes shouldn't have left him alone, but what's done is done.

"If I—" Tony's leg bounces faster. "You didn't see him."

She'd seen the same video feed as Tony. She'd seen and still wasn't seriously worried about James; she worried about the body in their morgue and if the person in that feed could possibly somehow be _him_.

She worries more that Tony is here for the wrong person.

Natasha flips a page and studies a full-page ad for something Michael Kors. "Are you here for Steve or for James?"

The bouncing stops. Tony crosses his arms and slouches in his chair. "No one calls him that," he mutters under his breath.

Natasha doesn't argue the point, and Tony never answers the question, not even when their wait turns into seven long, uncomfortable hours and too many cups of bad coffee to count.

It's Eicher who comes in to the waiting room, a clipboard and a tablet clutched in the same hand. Natasha wonders how the hospital agreed to let her treat here, but then thinks – not many doctors have experience with James' hardware, and not many come backed by Tony's clout and money.

Tony doesn't stand up. He flicks his eyes towards Eicher, then closes them – either too cool for school, or not dealing too well, either way.

Natasha drops her tenth magazine and gets to her feet, her heart and her stomach sharing the same space.

"You're listed as his next-of-kin," Eicher says.

Before leaving the Tower in October 2016, James had made sure of that. He'd looked her in the eyes and said, "I mean it," unquestionably referring to his wish to never again have heroic measures used to keep him alive.

"You," Tony comments, some strange mix of surprise, skepticism, curiosity, and something like anger coloring that word.

Natasha turns to meet his open-again eyes, unapologetic and  _daring him_  to say something else. For her trouble, she has the pleasure of witnessing the moment he puts two and two together.

That math is old. Doesn't calculate the same way anymore.

" _Oh_. Do you have any idea how scary this is?"

If that's all he's got, she considers herself lucky – and responds by walking away with Eicher.

They go up a floor to a lab, where Eicher hangs up old style, translucent gray x-ray sheets on lighted, white panels. Natasha makes out a skull, a spine, and a rib cage with a pair of lungs. When Eicher finishes, she turns around and leans against a metal lab table, arms crossed.

"This one makes more sense," Eicher comments. "Between you and me. And Hill."

Natasha can't parse the sentence fast enough. It's an odd feeling to lag behind.

"He matches our surgical work from the damage Captain Rogers inflicted in 2016. And he doesn't have three bullets that I distinctly remember having removed from his shoulder, stomach, and ankle."

Eighty-six days.

For eighty-six days, Eicher and Maria have known that the person in their morgue wasn't  _him_.

Natasha thinks of Steve first. They could lose him entirely over this.

"Who else knows?" Natasha asks.

Eicher shrugs. "I don't know. In Hill's defense, we didn't—don't—know. Fingerprints and DNA match. The one in SHIELD headquarters is James Barnes. The one here is James Barnes."

A Steve in Moscow and a Steve in Berlin. The Tesseract-like portal.

HYDRA has built something terrifying.

Natasha wants a closer look at the other James, to find the differences and pinpoint a timeframe. But: this one first.

"How's he doing?"

"Well, I think he's had a few adventures in the past few days." Eicher rattles off a grocery list of injuries, ending with a shrug. "Being what he is, he'll be fine."

Natasha stops herself from biting her cheek. This other Steve hadn't pulled any punches, like before in Death Valley.

"He never coded. He's breathing fine now. Expect a full, perhaps even quick, recovery. It's incredible."

Not the word Natasha would use.

"The cervical fractures were difficult to treat, mostly because of the existing hardware. There are no indications of damage to his spinal cord. I don't think he's lucky; I think…"

Eicher makes an inscrutable face. After several long seconds, she still doesn't voice a thought. From Eicher, that's weird.

Natasha takes a guess. "HYDRA engineered him to take the damage and keep going."

Eicher closes her eyes, opens them again, and smiles tight. "He's not careful."

Meaning: he still uses his body like a disposable battering ram. Those wires aren't easy to uncross.

"In any case, his neck needs to stay immobilized." Eicher briefly lifts her eyebrows and cocks her head, clearly indicating that she realizes what a challenge that will be. "He won't have much of a voice for a few weeks; in most patients, it's months. He may not remember the past few days. Bottom line: he's going to feel like he got hit by multiple buses and not remember why."

Natasha nods through all of it.

"Given everything, he's sedated, mostly for pain management, but also to ensure he gives himself time to heal."

Natasha shakes her head. "Bring him out. We need to talk to him."

Eicher stands taller, immediately preparing for a fight. "His body will heal, but it needs time and rest to do it."

"His body is in our morgue." No matter what the x-rays say. "You know that. I'll only need a few minutes to make sure."

Eicher blinks rapidly, looking away. "A few. And I'll call it."

Natasha nods agreement.

***

James peels his eyes open, an audible groan rumbling from his chest. For a moment, he's perfectly still, expression blank, and then his right hand drags toward the brace around his neck.

Natasha takes a step forward, ready to stop James from tearing the brace off, but he only feels around the plastic for a couple of seconds, before his hand slides down to his lap.

"My neck hurts," he says, his voice a thin, crackly rasp, and his words a mushed-together slur. "What's wrong with my voice?"

"You broke it," Natasha says, perhaps a few seconds too late.

James pulls a slow-motion face, eyes barely open. The skin underneath them is bruised and swollen. "My  _voice_?"

"Your  _neck_."

"Oh," he breathes, but he looks confused. He blinks and blinks, then keeps eye contact with her. "Hi. I didn't say 'hi.'"

"Hi, James," Natasha replies and can't hold back a smile. It's him. A long far gone piece of the world has slid back into place, and a smile is barely enough. "Where have you been? It's been a few months."

His confusion deepens. "Berlin."

Natasha briefly meets Tony's eyes and sees naked relief. Whether because he's genuinely happy that it's James, or genuinely happy for Steve that it's James, Natasha isn't sure that it matters.

Natasha looks back down and sees that James' eyes are open wider, but distant, unfocused – accessing information, always thinking. Eicher thinks he won't remember much, and maybe that's true. What Natasha knows is that, ironically, his memory is impeccable.

She sees the moment he remembers: the panicked spark in his eyes gives it away.

His legs draw up, like he thinks he's going somewhere. " _Steve_."

"Is fine," Natasha says loudly and puts a hand on James' closest leg. "He's fine. It's not what you think."

James doesn't buy it, not for a second. He tries to push himself up.

Alarms trip. Two nurses swarm forward, and Eicher looks at Natasha with hard eyes.

"James. Do you trust me?" Natasha squeezes his shoulder with purpose. She waits for him to look at her, more patient than she feels.

He musters out a weak, "Yeah. He—I don't know."

James collapses back into the bed, too hard. He winces.

"It wasn't Steve. We don't know what's going on, or who that Steve is, but he wasn't ours. He's safe and himself. I promise."

That's all it takes. His legs slide down, and he closes his eyes in relief.

"Okay," he says, voice about as thin as a crumpled piece of old paper.

"That's enough," Eicher decides. She nods at a nurse, who begins pushing a syringe into James' central line. "His body needs to rest."

"Nat, Nat. Nat. Nat," James begs, eyes still closed, waning against the drugs but never without a fight.

"I'm here. Go to sleep."

"No, no. Weidenstraße, Erik Albrecht. You should, um, you…" His breaths even out, and his whole body relaxes.

He's out.

He's alive.

He's not the body crumpled against a wall with a bullet in the head.

"He knows something," Natasha comments to Tony. She squeezes James' shoulder again and then backs away, toward the door. "I'll be back."

Tony makes a noise, panic on his face. "Um, no? Where are you going?"

"German apartments go by name, not number," Natasha calls back. "Stay with him."

" _Fuck_."

***

Weidenstraße is a nice, car-lined brick street in eastern Berlin, flanked on each side by tall, gray apartment buildings.

Natasha walks the sidewalk with purpose, eyes pointedly peering at each nameplate she passes. Her intended vibe is  _not a tourist_. Blend in, always – whatever that looks like at sometime past 0100 in the morning, skulking through the dark Berlin streets, sifting through apartments.

Natasha reaches the end of the first sidewalk, crosses the street, and begins to stroll the opposite side.

The hair on the back of her neck stands. Someone is following her.

Someone not good at their job is following her.

Or.

Without warning, Natasha stops and simply waits.

It never takes long.

"Hey."

Before turning around, Natasha rolls her eyes. Unbelievable.

"You're not supposed to be here," she says, annoyed and letting it show. "The police are…not happy with you."

Steve grins and points at his ball cap. "But I'm wearing a hat," he says, innocently.

A ball cap on a dark winter night, when it's barely 20 Fahrenheit right now. Convincing.

Natasha doesn't indulge him, although she enjoys this playful, happy side of him – rare, these days. And she gets it: James is alive and himself, where a half a day ago, he was frozen inside their morgue. Somehow, given that, it's easy to see past an international mess.

Steve turns serious, focused and intense – with a hint of vulnerable fear. "Is it him?"

Without hesitation, Natasha nods. "It's him."

She keeps to herself that at least two of their own had known, lied, and stonewalled for months. Now is hardly the time. She lets Steve have his moment of pure, alleviated happiness.

"Where's Sam?" Natasha asks.

Steve blinks. "…New York?" he guesses.

Abandoned in Moscow, more like. It's then that she puts together that Tony had clued Steve in on this specific location. She'd be mad, but Steve couldn't have gotten here this fast if he hadn't already been in Berlin. He'd had more than seven hours to get here.

"Not New York?" Steve tries. "I tried to call."

"Don't worry about it." Natasha nods her head toward a faded black door a few feet down the sidewalk. Partially illuminated by the kind rays of a streetlight, the small door sign reads 'Albrecht, Erik.' "That's the one."

"Do we know whose it is?" Steve asks.

Natasha shakes her head "no," although she's near certain that it belongs to James, if not SHIELD.

Together, they enter the apartment building.

The floors are old, wooden slat boards,  _creaking_  with every one of their steps. The  _thud, thud_  of their shoe soles echo through the openness of the foyer. Ahead of them, a timeworn staircase made of plain brown wood crawls up the five stories of units. Every step toward it  _creak-creaks, creak-creaks_.

Steve grimaces, visibly irritated.

Natasha smirks. It's a brilliant place to live.

"No point in trying," she says to Steve. "Early warning system."

Steve sighs, shakes his head, and starts up the steps, his weight a groaning monstrosity against the aging treads.

Natasha stays a few steps behind him, trying to listen for unusual sounds of movement or voices.

At this time of night, the complex is as quiet as expected, and nothing of the ambiance unnerves her. Then again, with Captain America and his 230 pounds of weight stomping up the stairs, anyone with a sliver of brain and a need to leave would already be long, long gone.

Natasha keeps that thought to herself.

At the fifth floor landing, Steve shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down the right wing of a long hallway. Natasha goes left, confident that she knows exactly James' strategy.

The left wing of the floor leads to a corner unit with only one window and one hallway access point. James hadn't chosen this building for an easy escape but rather for security against intruders. From inside the apartment, he would be able to hear every footstep, and he would know that a strike team would only have two impossible entry points.

That corner unit has a name on it: Albrecht, E.

Natasha eyes the outer door for obvious traps, finds none, but observes that the door handle has been broken. The damage doesn't appear to be via a tool or a blunt-force object; it looks more like it had been crushed.

Natasha lightly pushes against the door and finds gentle resistance: something lightweight is holding it closed.

She unzips her jacket, unlatches her sidearm holster, and looks down the hallway at Steve. She patiently waits for him to trot her way.

"You're slowing down in your old age," Natasha comments.

"I  _did_  retire."

"How was art school again?"

He gives her a dirty look. It's nice, she thinks, to have him be like this again, even though she knows it's momentary.

Steve shoulders his way inside the apartment, always first. Natasha casually walks through behind him, alert and ready.

The flat is a touch bigger than a studio. The floors are dark hard wood; the walls, made of smooth, light gray plaster. A small kitchen is nestled on their left; bags of potato chips and other assorted junk food fill the narrow countertop, along with a cluster of yellowed, bruised bananas, a half-loaf of fuzzy green French bread, and a crumpled pack of Davidoff cigarettes.

Directly in front of them, the living room is a small rectangle with a single, wide, curtained window, a dark blue sofa, a scratched-up coffee table, and a few stacks of books towering next to a boxy TV. A handful of empty Pepsi cans pile on the floor.

The most interesting part of the flat are the wrinkled, cheap clothes—a shirt, a jacket, pants, underwear, socks—forging a clear, strewn path toward a closed door. Likely a bedroom with the only bathroom.

Everything except those clothes is markedly James. He's not careless with his clothes, even cheap clothes, and he's not messy this way. Natasha deducts he'd been in a rush – and that he hadn't expected anyone to come here.

"Definitely his," Steve comments, a rare, wide smile on his face.

Natasha agrees but still doesn't see why James told her to come here. A book and a folded newspaper lay on the coffee table – that's all. No computer, no gear, no maps – nothing.

Natasha nods toward the closed door. "Check out the bedroom."

As Steve moves toward the door, Natasha goes to the coffee table, her attention on the folded newspaper. Maybe he wrote something there.

In her peripheral vision, she sees Steve open the bedroom door and step inside.

Natasha picks up and unfolds the newspaper. It's written in Polish and is dated for yesterday morning. The pages are wrinkled near the middle, as if he'd clutched it in his hand. The pages are clean, except for a hand-drawn circle around the date and a coffee ring on the bottom of the front page. She scans that page for handwriting, finding none, then reads the headlines of each of the articles.

_The Greatest Films of 2017._

_The Cartoons of the Year._

_More Money for Pop, Rock and Ja—_

A voice carries from the bedroom: "Hi, Steve. You're very loud."

***

The books. The junk food. The Pepsi cans. Hell, even the worn-in, comfortable-looking sofa. They're all clues pointing to one person.

"Definitely his," Steve smiles.

The old fruit and bread mean that Bucky has been here  _within the past few days_.

_Bucky's alive._

_He's alive and okay._

It's almost the only thought that matters, before another one smashes to the foreground: Sharon isn't HYDRA.

Whatever is happening is bigger than them, but it feels like another endless chance has fallen into his lap. He won't waste it.

"Check out the bedroom," Natasha says, something like worry coloring her tone.

Steve's happy to do that. He moves toward the closed white door, leaving Natasha to explore the living room.

As he nears the bedroom, an aroma of hair cream, gun solvent, soda, coffee, and a tinge of cigarette smoke pierces the air. The combination of scents distinctly reminds Steve of a small house in São Paulo. He never thought he'd smell it again.

Steve pushes the door's handle down and open. The floorboards  _creak_ as he steps inside the lamp-lit bedroom.

The closet is organized, clothes hung neatly. The white window blinds are open, a bright streetlight streaming through. The queen bed is made, while a person rifles through a bag set atop the wrinkled white duvet.

That person is Sharon.

Steve freezes up, not sure he trusts his eyes. He hasn't seen Sharon for over a year, not since… Not since.

She looks up, unsurprised. "Hi, Steve. You're very loud."

"You're okay," Steve blurts before he can even think to stop himself. He grits his teeth and locks his jaw, hoping it's enough to keep his mouth closed.

She makes eye contact, her lips pressed thin, and her body language telling him that she's as unsure as he is. A long, faded red scar mars the front of her neck, nearly on top of her jugular.

_They…_

"How is he?" Sharon inquires.

"Bucky?" he asks, dumbly.

Sharon lifts her eyebrows and almost rolls her eyes. "Yeah."

It makes sense. A few minutes of the fight had been broadcast, and the whole incident is still being covered by the news. Steve knows: his own image is being pummeled, and the world demands to know about the newest, unknown Avenger. All things that Maria and Rhodey are handling, or so he constantly reminds himself, and if they fail – police will swarm here.

A small line of panic curls up inside his stomach, overridden by the healthy, right-minded person standing not even six feet away from him.

"He's doing okay," Steve answers, mimicking most of Tony's words from last night. "Why are you here?"

"He was supposed to meet me. He didn't make it." Sharon holds up a night vision scope. "I came for what's on this. I need you to leave."

So: Bucky's been working with Sharon for the entire three months Bucky was supposed to have been dead. And Sharon's been right here in Berlin, not recovering with SHIELD in some secret, safe, undisclosed location. Another set of SHIELD's dirty lies.

In October, they'd been  _a train ride_ from finding them here.

A line of anger coils up alongside the panicked one.

Right now, he focuses more on Sharon than that. On how she's all business, so cold it burns. She hasn't asked how he's been doing. Hasn't said "I missed you." Hasn't called. Hasn't anything.

"The window planters came," Steve says. "They sat by the door for months. Decent neighbors, I guess."

"Depends on how you look at it," Sharon responds. "I need you to leave."

He tries to count away the building barbs of anger but only gets to  _two_. "We had plans, Sharon. What HYDRA did doesn't—"

"Captain," she interrupts. Her severe expression distorts her face into something he barely recognizes. "I need you to leave, so I can leave and do my job."

 _Captain_. It's been a long time since  _Captain_.

"What's in Poland?" Natasha suddenly asks.

Steve doesn't bother turning around; he keeps his eyes on Sharon, trying like hell not to show her that a needle is pricking holes into his heart.

Sharon looks past him and shakes her head. "I don't know. Why?"

He hears paper crinkle and then smells an odd mix of newsprint and coffee. "James was in Michašta yesterday morning."

That throws Sharon, badly. Her face crumples with confusion, and she even takes a step forward before she catches herself. Her eyes open wide. "No. He— He doesn't do things like that."

How Sharon says that, like SHIELD controls Bucky, shoots adrenaline through Steve's body. He tries to count and breathe, but today's not been so great for that. "What do you mean."

"His assignment was to recon a Soviet base in eastern Berlin. He checked in that afternoon. Then he went completely off-grid for six days, until yesterday.  _That's_  not like him."

"He did," Natasha replies. "He sent me here. What did he think I would find? You?"

Sharon's eyes flick to Steve, then back to Natasha. She holds up the night vision scope. "This."

"What's on it?" Steve asks.

"Not here," Sharon says, right before she picks up a dirt-streaked, damp black backpack. "Follow me."

***

Sharon leads Natasha and Steve to the unit's safe house in central Berlin. Of safe houses, it's more than nice. Tucked into the corner of the twelfth floor of a condo high rise, it's also not quite a "house." It's more Stark than anything.

The white kitchen tends to serve as Ops, and its natural-wood island is where Sharon unceremoniously deposits Barnes' soggy backpack. Natasha isn't shy about joining her there; Steve hangs back, arms crossed, body tense.

Sharon ignores him and barely acknowledges Natasha. Neither are part of this unit, and neither should be here.

Regardless, she unzips the pack and empties its contents. At Barnes' flat, she had only gotten as far as unpacking wrinkled wads of wet clothes from it. She finds a soggy passport, wet Euros, matted paper maps, a smashed tablet, and a crushed phone.

The phone explains why he hadn't checked in.

Poland may explain the wrecked gear.

Nothing explains Poland.

Sharon looks to the tactical surveillance scope. Its video is the first thing he tried to send her. It has answers.

She hooks it up to her laptop and directly accesses its media files. There are two.

As the first one cues up, Steve draws closer. Sharon glares over her shoulder, until he stops.

"He uploaded these to SHIELD's server. The files I received were too damaged. I'm hoping it will read better directly from the source."

She'd spent too many long hours trying to fix those damaged files, hoping to avoid going to his flat. Even if SHIELD clears him, the chance had still existed to walk into the middle of an Interpol raid. Either SHIELD has done its job well, or Barnes had avoided CCTV cameras. Probably both, when she thinks about it.

The timestamp on the first video is for 1532 on 26 December 2017. The picture focuses on a pond and a very old vehicle. It shakes and tilts toward the ground, then refocuses on a freight car with Polish writing on the side. A photo icon pops up on the bottom corner of the video, indicating that Barnes had logged fifteen photos.

The freight car is odd, but, overall, nothing. For some reason, Barnes had thought it was something.

"That's from Kraków."

Sharon pauses the video and reluctantly turns to address Steve. "How do you know that?"

"Because it was there," Steve replies, "when he pulled the knife in '15. Same freight car."

Sharon's eyes flick to Natasha.

Natasha's eyebrow raises. "He told me about that place. It spooked him."

Baseless conjecture. Sharon holds onto that comment and un-pauses the video.

It holds steady on the pond for many long minutes. Sharon fast forwards, watching the minutes tick as dusk wanes into bright green night vision.

At 2013, the image jerks.

Sharon slows the playback down to normal, wishing it had sound.

It jerks again.

A foreign light reflects off the rusted metal of the vehicle and bounces off the flat surface of the pond. That light bobs, again and again.

"Someone was out there," Steve says. "Someone was there."

A few seconds later, Steve is proven right. A tall, thick-figured man walks into the scope's line of sight. Light-colored hair. Round shield. Assault rifle.

Sharon pauses the video, not because she wants to analyze the frame but because her heart is racing, while shame blossoms across her red-hot face.

"It was the other you," Natasha corrects. "James tripped something."

Steve handles it well. "Doesn't explain how he got to Poland."

No, it doesn't.

Sharon presses play.

After a minute, the light flashes toward Barnes and the video turns black. Stupidly, Sharon holds her breath. They all know the end of the story.

The scope reorients but the video shows only a green-lit, empty forest. Again and again, the video pans back and forth through the trees, hopelessly searching, fear palpable through the screen.

After many, many minutes, the video settles. It becomes still enough that Sharon suspects the playback has frozen.

Too much water, Sharon suspects.

She reaches toward the trackpad, at the same time that Steve extends his hand, a hair away from hers. She hadn't realized he'd wandered so close.

He pulls back. "It's still going. Timestamp."

Sharon shifts uncomfortably and flicks her eyes back to the screen. He's right: the slider inches sideways, and the timestamp ticks through numbers. The video holds still – a sniper's steady hand at videography.

She fast forwards again, sifting through hours of unmoving footage. Then, all of a sudden, it jerks and flashes a brilliant blue.

Daylight shines on the video, replacing the nighttime forest in a split second. The timestamp syncs with a satellite and updates the date: 31 December 2017. Happy New Year.

"The timestamp changed dates," Steve notes, never one to miss a single detail.

She hasn't let herself miss that.

The image tilts sideways into a too-fast blink of tall, windowless stone buildings and moss-covered streets.

"No way," Steve breathes. "That's the town."

No wonder this was the only thing on Barnes' mind.

The video flips to a black-clothed soldier who quickly dies in a burst of blood. It shakes and turns, then only shows black netting and the ground. It bounces and bounces, over and over. He was running.

Sharon speeds up the video. The terrain turns from cracked concrete to grass then to forest foliage and mountainous rocks. For a long time, it bounces and bobs, wildly jolting up and down, faster and faster. A nauseated headache mounts behind Sharon's eyes.

Startlingly, the video jerks and drags backwards, then spins back around. It only shows leaves and rocks. The image spins once more, jolts, and then hurls a stomach-curling image of a hundred-plus-foot drop into a river far, far below.

It hits with a violent shudder, then sinks into dark, blurry water. That's all it shows for nearly fifteen minutes, until it transitions to a gray shore of gravel and pebbles.

For the last time, Sharon fast forwards the video, through an hour and sixteen minutes of walking through rock and water, until the footage ends.

All three of them stay silent, unsure of what to say.

Steve is the first to break that silence. "We all saw that. It's not only Tesseract portals."

Sharon doesn't comment that having two Steves running around had been a decent clue on its own. Instead, she comments, "There's another video. Same day."

Natasha says nothing, either in expression or in words.

Sharon clicks into it. The video is only 55 seconds and starts by peering up a high-reaching vertical tunnel, then down a long, horizontal tunnel that leads into pitch blackness, before focusing on a hatch door built into a concrete wall next to a ladder.

The photo icon pops up: eight photos, GPS logged.

The video ends.

"That was another base," Natasha states.

"He thought it was important," Sharon agrees.

"So did HYDRA," Steve points out. "He found something they didn't want him to bring back to SHIELD."

A fair theory.

Attacking in broad daylight in a major city center is either a bold move or a panicked one. They'd sent Steve to kill him.

Sharon looks to Natasha, one thought on her mind:  _We go_.

Natasha meets Sharon's eyes and gives a small nod. "We'll need maps."

"Let me see what I can pull together." Sharon checks in with herself and decides she can't afford to fight against the tide known as Steve and Natasha. "Food is in the fridge. Bathroom." She gestures around the corner. "Gear is in the living room."

She grabs Barnes' paper maps and walks toward the bedroom that hasn't been a bedroom since SHIELD moved in. Before her time here, it had been converted into a war room, complete with Stark Industries' newest, state-of-the-art technology.

Sharon flips the lights on and lays the wad of maps onto a smart table. With a few quick swipes of her fingers, a soft green light emits from below the glass top and scours the maps from every side and angle.

From the table, Sharon has a clear view into the living room. Steve paces, shoulders tight and arms crossed, like he does when he can't take control of his worry. Natasha sifts through the cabinet of computer hardware before pulling out a Lenovo laptop.

"We're going, right?" Steve asks.

Natasha tilts her head, then turns to face him head on. "You shouldn't be here."

Steve's shoulders drop, arms by his side. "He's  _alive_ , Natasha. Where do you think I'd be?"

An odd statement.

Sharon watches Natasha's expression turn to something like apprehensive concern. Managing Steve is often like walking a high wire: recognizing when to stop, knowing how to balance, and understanding that the blowing wind isn't always predictable. At least, that's the Steve she remembers.

"New York," Natasha answers, "with Sam. You're not cleared to work in the field."

Sharon feels her cheeks burn, and she looks down at the maps. The green light is still scanning.

"Not cleared… It's _Bucky_ , not a god damned field assignment."

"When you're arrested, how are you going to help him?"

"Who the hell is going to arrest me in the middle of a Polish mountain range?" Steve catches himself in his own outrage and dials it back. "I can still do this. I'm still— I've been there. Neither of you have been."

Against all odds, Natasha softens her approach, the strong friendship between them showing. "I know. Let's look at the aerials."

Steve acquiesces with the slightest of nods.

A notification pops onto the corner – 86% reconstructed. Not terrible.

The reconstructed maps appear above the table, five of them holographically displayed in crystal clear high definition. Too wet, the system couldn't reconstruct Barnes' handwritten notes, and the blue ink illegibly bleeds across the landscapes.

That's a shame. The notes would have been the most helpful.

No matter. Sharon pulls up the coordinates that followed Barnes' message of  _"Maps don't match terrain. Moving forward."_ She runs them both against a live satellite aerial of Müggelheimer Damm and against Barnes' maps.

They match to the outskirts of the Tatra Mountains south of Kraków, Poland.

Open mouthed, Sharon can't take her eyes from the aerial image, mind spinning around the impossibilities. Barnes had crossed four hundred miles and not even known.

Sharon shakes the shock and goes about this a different way. She pulls the timestamp from his message – 1150. The mission began at 1000 that morning. Sharon calculates his likely speed – ability tempered by sensibility – and creates a working set of bounds for where he might have been upon realizing the terrain was wrong.

She expands the square containing Map One—the most recent topo map of the Müggelheimer Damm area—and overlays the bounds. She sends the map to her phone and tablet. If they go, that's a place to start.

In the living room, Steve points at Natasha's screen, once, twice, three times, in different spots each time.

Natasha pushes the laptop to Steve. "You're Ops. Map it out."

Steve takes it, a strange mix of satisfaction and resentment in his body language. Always a doer.

Natasha leaves him alone on the sofa and comes into the War Room, shutting the door behind her.

Sharon gestures toward the holographic map and fills Natasha in on her findings. Amusingly, when Sharon gets to the "somehow in the Tatra Mountains" part, Natasha's jaw doesn't drop – but her eyes widen.

"We still have no idea what it is that HYDRA is doing," Sharon comments, then wonders. "Do we?"

Natasha shakes her head: no, they don't. Sharon believes her, even. "There are parts of this that you don't know about yet. Not that those parts are particularly helpful."

Unsurprising.

Sharon moves on, unwilling to beg for information. "They're clearly using technology derived from the Tesseract." It had been in SHIELD's hands for seventy years, which means it had been in HYDRA's hands for seventy years. There's no question. "I don't know that we have time to spare on this. We need mission approval."

Natasha glances at the door—toward Steve—but nods a limited form of agreement. "We're shorthanded on this one. But he's laying out the playing field and coming up with a game plan."

Sounds good enough. Even a recon mission to collect intelligence would be helpful – more helpful than stumbling around blind, like they apparently have been for weeks.

Which begs the question. "Where did SHIELD learn about the Berlin base?"

Natasha raises a shoulder and shakes her head twice. "Ask Hill." Said like a person holding onto resentment. Interesting. "You think it was intentional."

Sharon glances at the holographic map and thinks back to the scope's video. All things considered. "I don't believe in coincidences."

"Neither do I."

Could be a bad mission from the start. Could be another mission of theirs that HYDRA had somehow known about – a nasty little habit they  _still_ haven't been able to kick.

Awkwardly, Natasha looks at her, jaw working enough for Sharon to notice. "How are you doing?"

There it is. A question asked from someone who knows better than to think them friends. Sharon replies as a professional. "It's a good unit."

Barnes does his job and doesn't make trouble. Easy.

"Doesn't answer my question," Natasha retorts, expression telegraphing that she's unwilling to let it go. "We assigned him to you for a reason."

Sharon shows her skepticism, loud and clear.

"You're not doing."

Sharon bristles, shoulders tense, teeth gritted. Her control slips. "I'm doing  _my job_. That doesn't include fucking Captain America."

Not in the literal sense, at least.

Natasha doesn't show a reaction. "Okay."

Something else is on Natasha's mind, or so says the half-inhaled breath and uncertainty in her eyes.

"Just say it," Sharon snaps, more than ready for this to be over and already regretting asking for a mission with them.

"HYDRA had another Barnes. He died three months ago."

Sharon is hardly taken by surprise. It also explains the odd coffee date with Hill back in October.

Given everything else, it makes sense that they would. The problem is finding out how they're getting, finding, or God forbid, making extra people.

"And?" Sharon prompts.

Natasha plays it off, ever cool. "FYI."

"Good to know. When do we go?"

***

Tony happens to glance up and notices a pair of blue, glazed eyes blinking at him.

"Hey." Tony waves his tablet in the air and gestures at Barnes' left arm. "I'm fixing the arm you trashed. That okay with you?"

"Yeah," Barnes says, his voice the consistency of a scrape. "Thanks."

Tony doesn't say "don't thank me for breaking your neck." He has a sense of where Barnes would take it. Instead, Tony nods and puts his attention back on the arm.

A few seconds later, Barnes asks, "How many?"

Tony looks back up, only for a moment. "Not including HYDRA, seven. Could've been more."

Honest to god could've been, and this impossible equation of a person keeps adding variables. Or losing them. Tony hasn't decided.

Barnes' eyes wander away. "'Kay."

"You in pain?" Tony wonders, probably a bit too late.

Tony doesn't hear an answer, and he glances up. It looks like Barnes has drifted back off. That's good – easier. Tony's not sure if he's relieved about it.

At least a minute and a half later, Barnes actually  _answers_. "No. Is Steve really okay?"

"How does your head feel?" Tony tries to sound glib, but the guy had cracked his skull open and bruised his brain not even 24 hours ago. He still has the ugly forehead laceration and under-eye bruising to show for it.

The sharp, intense stare Barnes pins him with disproves brain damage. Probably. "Steve."

"Wasn't him. I was  _with him_  in Moscow, when the one in Berlin jumped you. We don't know how, so don't ask."

A funny thing happens: Barnes doesn't look so much confused as he does introspective, before he closes his eyes again.

"Okay." Tony lowers his tablet and leans back in his plastic chair. "Time to spill. What do you know?"

"I saw him the other night in Berlin," Barnes says, his voice so decrepit that Tony needs to lean back in to hear. "I didn't realize it then. And again in Poland."

"Poland?" Tony decides that it probably doesn't matter. "What's at the apartment?"

Barnes reopens his eyes. "What?"

"Erik Albrecht. Weidenstraße. You told Romanoff to go there."

It doesn't seem like Barnes remembers that. Regardless, he answers, "Video. They're doing something."

When Steve says "they" like that, he only ever means "HYDRA." The same cereal box decoder ring works with Barnes, evidently.

"Yeah, we kinda already got that," Tony bites, because, uh, they  _had_. Maybe a bit of fear influences his next step. "Before 2012, did you ever hear about HYDRA working with the Tesseract? SHIELD had it, so HYDRA had it."

When Barnes melts into confusion and rasps, "What the hell's a Tesseract?" – well, Tony believes him.

"Glowing blue box? Makes portals? Made all of HYDRA's weapons back in the day?"

To his credit, Barnes looks like he's thinking back, but he ends up trying to shake his head. The brace won't let him. "Oh. That. I never saw that."

"Shame. Get some sleep."

Surprisingly, Barnes doesn't fight the advice. He slips back asleep, his right hand keeping a fist of the blankets.

Tony lets his eyes hover on Barnes, thoughts rolling aimlessly. The biggest of those thoughts is that he's like a different person to Tony – two separate equations entirely.

Tony puts his attention back onto his tablet.

The hologram is fine and perfectly responded to Tony's command to lock into the "on" position. It's the arm itself that's the problem.

Tony can't tell if it's the arm that's shot or if it's the chips, but the code isn't responding the way it's supposed to. Parts of the software are completely wiped out, leaving no good way to explain how the hell Barnes had survived Rogers.

What he thinks is that he needs better hardware to even start fixing this. An argument stands to be made that Barnes is the one who could stand to use an upgrade.

An hour and fourteen minutes later, after Tony's ass and brain are far past numb, Sam walks through the doorway.

He stops partway in, his eyes scouring the train wreck lying in the bed. "Jesus Christ… Is it him?"

Sam sounds like relief, skepticism, and shock all rolled into one knotted-up ball of confusion.

Tony quickly glances up, nods, says "you bet," and gets back to his work. The shine of the surprise has worn off: they'd gotten duped, plain and simple, and it's time to move on and take care of the latest HYDRAgenated mess.

"How is he?"

"He's fine." Well. "Will be fine."

"He looks like shit." Sam sits on the other side of the bed, arms perched on his knees. His eyes don't leave Barnes. "This whole thing is crazy."

That quickly, Tony's not really listening. His focus is back on his tablet and the maze of code. He can't fix it with this, but he can tag problem areas to make his life easier tomorrow.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sam reach for the area of Barnes' right arm that isn't bandaged, make contact, and instantly get rebuked. Barnes pulls his arm away and croaks, "Stop," without really ever waking up.

On Tony's tablet, lines of code change. Either an aborted movement on Barnes' end, or a reflection that his entire system, one way or another, is wired into the arm.

Sam huffs and leans back in his chair, arms crossed. "Great. It's him."

Tony tries not to smile. "You here to stay?"

Sam nods.

"Best news I've heard all day."

Tony powers off his tablet and stands up, his lower back popping and shoulders cracking. He grabs his jacket and heads toward the door.

"Wait. Where are you going?"

"Picking up some hardware. Be back in a while."

As Tony leaves, Sam tosses a "nice to see ya" his way.

***

At 0316 in the morning, Sam in the transition between reading the end of a long  _Atlantic_  article and battling the pull of sleep, he hears purposeful rustling and heavy breathing. He moves his eyes toward the former unmoving lump in the bed, right in time to see a plastic neck brace sail through the air and  _bounce, bounce, bounce_  across the floor.

Tablet on the ground, Sam shoots to his feet and doesn't think before grabbing Barnes' right arm. "Dude, you broke your neck,  _stop_."

In the dim room, Sam can mostly only see the whites of Barnes' eyes. A little threatening.

"I don't care." The right arm rips out of Sam's grip. " _Steve_."

"He's fine. I swear to God, he's fine. It wasn't—"

Sam can't speak quickly enough. The eye-whites disappear, and he hears bare feet slap against the floor. Blankets and sheets whip through the air. Monitors shriek: heart rate spiking, blood pressure too high.

Sam races to the other side of the bed, flipping the lights on as he goes, right in time to see Barnes fall hard onto his tailbone. Worst of all, he stays down.

Head tilted against the wall, eyes closed, Barnes laments, "What the  _hell_?"

"You're hurt. It's not like you're careful."

"Oh my god, I'm not talking about this again," Barnes breathes.

It's  _definitely_  him.

Through the petulance, Sam can feel waves of panicked helplessness roll through the room. Barnes can't rely on himself right now, and that apparently doesn't settle so well.

Sam takes a chance and sits down on the floor, legs crossed. He pulls a blanket off the bed and tosses it at Barnes. Barnes takes it and uses it to cover his lap and legs. Even covered, Sam can tell that his left thigh isn't doing him any favors, and so Sam reaches up for a pillow. Barnes even lets him slide it under his left leg.

"It was Steve," Barnes says.

Sam knows of only one thing he can say to shut this down, but it's not for him to say. It's not for any of them to say. "It wasn't. I promise."

Anger bubbles under Barnes' skin. The monitors shriek louder. Sam swears he's gearing up to try to stand again. "It  _was_. I was  _there_. It was him."

Nothing will stop him except the truth.

Sam licks his lips and pulls the proverbial trigger. "Three months ago, you killed yourself inside a HYDRA base in the Tabernas Desert. I helped take your body home. I had to tell Steve. We mourned you. Kinda tried to avenge you. Here you are."

Barnes freezes so perfectly that time may well have stopped. His eyes move first, darting back and forth, filtering through unvoiced thoughts, while his jaw slowly but surely drops.

The monitors go silent, except for the steady  _beep, beep, beep, beep_  of his heart.

Finally, fucking  _finally_ , Barnes says something. "Bullshit. That base is gone."

It's like being with Steve: circles, round and round, orbiting the same irrational point. There are some good reasons why.

Coupled with the head injury, the IVs pierced into Barnes' chest and hand are still connected – and must be dripping real nice, potent drugs into his system. In the light, his eyes are glassy, bloodshot, and dull. Beyond that, his face is drawn and exhausted, while fading raccoon bruising from the head injury exaggerates hollow, dark circles under his eyes.

None of that matters, not when Barnes keeps talking.

"I went there in 2016 after Kazakhstan. It was filled in with concrete." Barnes' voice gives, but it doesn't stop him. "About three hours west of Murcia, right? Near the mines?"

Give or take.

It's Sam's turn to freeze up, as he thinks back to the newer (destroyed) floors, the shiny (soot-covered) elevator doors, and the newer equipment inside of the Tabernas base. Nobody fills in a subterranean complex with concrete and somehow rebuilds it without anyone knowing – and not in less than a year. No way.

A heavy, icy chill trickles through his body. Like Insight, like 2016, this feels insurmountable, and he doesn't even know what the hell it is.

Barnes looks past Sam toward the door. Sam follows his line of sight and sees Eicher pick up the neck brace.

"You don't sleep?" Sam asks.

"Not today."

She means  _not with him here_. Sam knows the feeling.

Eicher walks to them, tosses the brace onto the bed, and crosses her arms, all ten of her smooth blue-painted fingernails tapping the backs of her elbows. "How are you feeling?"

"Perfect," Barnes replies, like an asshole.

"You could say 'thank you,'" Sam admonishes – and, Christ, he sounds like his mom.

Eicher nods, as patient as could be. "Good to hear. You still can't stay down there." She tilts her head, eyes on his left leg. "Did your leg give out?"

Barnes quietly sighs. "Yeah. And my back." He lifts his right hand. "What's in this?"

Sam's gut twists, his thoughts hovering on a body back home.

"Toradol for pain and Ativan for sedation; saline to dilute. Nothing you're used to." Eicher has a way with words; between the lines, what she's saying is that it's nothing HYDRA used on him recently. "The point was for you to stay still and heal."

Barnes has nothing to say to that. Also: he's fading, or so say the long stretches of time between his blinks.

"C'mon, off the floor."

Sam moves out of the way. He marvels at how smoothly Eicher helps Barnes to his feet and how gently she deposits him back into the bed. Barnes lets her do it without one complaint.

She drags a white sheet and a light blue blanket over his lower body. "How's your neck?"

An answer doesn't come, because he's already passed out asleep.

 _He trusts her_ , Sam thinks.

Even asleep, Eicher keeps talking to him. She describes everything she's doing—checking his leg, checking his back, checking his ribs, checking his arm—a hair before she does it. She says something about ordering a portable x-ray of his neck to see about the brace and gets in a jab about not having enough equipment available to check his head.

Meanwhile, Sam cracks his back, then lays down on a five-foot, three-cushion banquet seat against the far wall. He twists himself so that his legs stretch across the floor, and, for now, it's comfortable enough.

Sam watches her check the IV on Barnes' hand and the IV in his chest, then squeeze the couple of bags hanging on the IV stand. When she's all done, it's impossible to tell that, ten minutes ago, a couple of guys had been hanging out on the floor.

"He looks okay. I'm bringing in a portable x-ray to check his cervical spine."

"Already?" Sam inquires; it can't already be anywhere near healed.

"He heals quickly. We'll see." Eicher puts her hands into her lab coat's pockets and considers him. "Security here is good. I'll be here. You can sleep."

Sam nods, the lights steep into a dim darkness, and not long after he falls into an uneasy sleep.

He wakes up to the sound of shrieking monitors.

_God damn it._

His body wedged into the tiny five-foot corner, Sam simply opens his eyes.

Barnes is a fucking idiot.

He's already gotten through most of the leads. According to those shrieking monitors, he doesn't have a pulse, or a blood pressure, or oxygen in his blood, and he isn't breathing.

Sam doesn't think the monitors are too far off, what the white pallor that's extremely contrasted by his dark beard. His eyes are still glassy, and Sam swears to God he's wobbling on his feet.

At least he's on his feet. He  _is_ a fast healer.

Sam rolls to his own feet, shakes out his pant legs, and rubs his eyes as he walks.

"B. What're you doing."

Unapologetically, Barnes glances at Sam, croaks "pants" like some confused frog, pulls out the hand IV, and sucks the top of his hand to stop the bleeding. He gestures at his dick area with his left hand and looks at Sam expectantly.

There are days, like today, when Sam misses the time they could barely stand each other. Being friends with this mess is asking too much.

"You know you look like a pile of cold shit, right?" Sam doesn't wait for some sort of new gesture. He plows ahead. "We just did this, like—" Sam has no idea how long it's been, so he guesses. "—seven hours ago."

It might have been longer.

"Pants."

Sam doesn't budge. "That the only word you know?"

"Fucking pants."

Despite it all, Sam genuinely laughs, until it hits him: somehow, Barnes isn't dead. Better yet, he's alive and himself.

Sam watches Barnes close his eyes and keep them closed, a glimpse of sweet relief crossing his face. All he has to do is stop pushing for five seconds and let himself rest. He'll never do it – and certainly not here.

Maybe if they get him back to New York…

Sam texts Tony to pick up clothes, which probably means Tony will have JARVIS somehow make it happen. He thinks about mentioning to make sure the clothes are dark – black, gray – and decent material – Sam's noticed that – but that would only give Tony an opening to pick up something distinctly not any of those things.

Tony's answer is almost immediate:  _"Sure. On my way back. He's leaving?"_

" _He thinks so,"_ Sam responds.

"Clothes are on the way. I'll get a nurse for the other stuff – don't pull it out, okay."

Barnes opens his eyes, blinks a few times, and then slightly nods. "Thanks."

It's an opening for something deeper, something that Sam's been wanting to say for eight months. Later, maybe.

"You're exhausted, aren't you?" Sam notes.

Another slight nod. "Not here."

Sam's no doctor, but he figures Barnes is stable enough to hop a SHIELD flight to New York.  _If_ he'll go there, and  _if_  he'll stay there. There's nowhere else that's safe, is the thing.

Eicher walks in, nose pressed into a tablet, her chipped red nails tapping its backside. She has a syringe held between the fingers of her free hand. She glances at the hospital bed. Instantly, her face falls, and the tablet drops to her side.

"Hey, Doc," Sam greets. "He thinks he's leaving."

"I  _am_ ," Barnes argues.

Her eyes snap to their side of the room, as if she hadn't seen them there. "You need to stay. You're not well."

Sam stops himself from facepalming. There are probably worse fighting words than that, but, in a pinch, those'll do fine.

"Fuck you," Barnes rasps.

Eicher advances forward, and Barnes actually surrenders ground with a step backward. His back is almost literally in a corner, and Sam knows him well enough to feel his panic.

Sam darts between them, hands out – one to stop Eicher, the other to calm Barnes.

Stone cold, Eicher states, "It's an antibiotic. Sit down and let me put the IV back in."

Barnes breaks his laser-focused eye contact for a millisecond – to spare a look at the window. His left arm announces the plan with an odd-sounding  _click-click-whir._

"Don't break the fucking window, man," Sam warns. "What're you gonna really do? In a hospital dress?"

"I'm leaving," Barnes bites. He turns a full glare back onto Eicher, someone he trusted a handful of hours ago. " _You_  don't come near me."

"It's an antibiotic," Eicher repeats, hard and unforgiving. "Get back in the bed."

The arm  _whirs_  again. Barnes' elbow bends and his shoulder draws up. He's gonna break the window and jump.

Sam steps deep into Eicher's space, hands on her shoulders. She might not realize how aggressive a move it is.

They're done here.

"He's leaving. Tony's bringing clothes. That's it."

Eicher stares past Sam for way too many long, long seconds, her head cocking as she bites the inside of her cheek. Then, _finally_ , she shrugs away from Sam's hands, turns around, and leaves.

Sam balls up a mound of stress and pushes it away for later. He turns around, preparing to lay into Barnes for being a stubborn dumbass – but Barnes' right hand is visibly shaking, and there's nothing but defiance in his face.

Three months ago, someone exactly like him committed suicide – backed into a corner, nowhere left to go, a single bullet to his name.

Sam understands.

"I'm going to go talk to Eicher. Tony should be back soon. Please don't break the window."

He gets a miniscule nod of agreement.

Sam tracks Eicher down to a nurse's station. She sees him, shakes her head, and begins poking at her tablet.

That's all well and good. She knows better than this. Hell, she'd been one of the key people involved in keeping Barnes calm and cooperative after Death Valley.

"You scared the shit out of him," Sam announces.

Eicher doesn't bother looking up. Plainly, she states, "It was antibiotics."

Sam stops himself from crossing his arms. Purposefully, he loosens his arms, keeps them at his side, and squares his stance. "You know his background."

Eicher laughs, not quite bitter, and regards Sam. "This is a  _hospital_."

Sam crosses his arms, tight and tense, and has  _no idea_ why they're having this conversation. "Remember the one back home? The one who detonated a base and put a bullet in his head?"

Eicher visibly flinches, her face comically freezing into shock and surprise, while her eyebrows quiver. She swallows and nods agreement. "Is he still leaving the hospital?"

"Ooooh, yeah. Nothing's stopping him except  _maybe_  pants."

"He needs a doctor. Where is he going?"

Sam shrugs. "No idea. We'll keep you posted."

Eicher fixes him with an intense, strangely familiar stare. "Please do."

As he walks back to Barnes, all Sam can think is that he can't wait to go home and put these fucking crazy days behind them.

It's a naïve thought.

***

As the day ekes into the late afternoon, clothes  _finally_  come, and Barnes can't get them on fast enough. His shoulder feels better. His neck and left leg  _don't_ , despite all the drugs buzzing through his body. In fact, his left leg can barely support his weight.

Sam watches him limp – every step, every falter, every wince. As expected, as Barnes pulls on shoes, Sam snipes, "Just saying I told you so."

Barnes doesn't reply. He leaves the hospital gown on the floor and doesn't look back.

Without any fanfare—no discharge process, no attempt at a wheelchair—Sam leads him toward the parking garage. Not the entrance.

Afraid to ask but more afraid of not knowing, Barnes asks, "What about the police?"

Sam punches through the push bar on a set of double doors, holding one of them open for Barnes to proudly limp through. "Congratulations. You're an Avenger. Comes with perks. Hill already gave your statement, and Rhodes is taking care of the rest."

It shouldn't be a surprise, since Hill had been all over him about that last year. But it's different to hear it said as a reality. It's different to hear Sam say that they more than had his back. When his eyes prickle, he tells himself it's the drugs. Has to be.

Sam ends the nice moment with, "Yeah, your new codename is 'Stupid Fuckhead.'"

He's tempted to laugh out loud, but the thumping, pounding pain in his head warns against that. "Ha."

On the third floor of the parking garage, a glistening black BMW SUV idles parallel to the door. Barnes slides into the spacious backseat. The leg room alone is more than enough to let him fully stretch out his left leg, and, if he wanted, he could almost comfortably spread out across the back seat.

It's tempting. Although he has exactly zero regrets about leaving the hospital, he yearns for a quiet, dark place to lay down for a really long time.

The door closes behind him.

Sam doesn't get in.

_What the –_

He looks out the tinted-black window and sees Sam standing with Stark about two meters from the vehicle. They think he can't hear them.

"They went where Barnes went. They're not responding to any form of communication."

He spins "they" around in his head, deducing quickly that Stark is referring to Natasha and probably Reliant.

Sam steps backward and spins in a circle, hands scrubbing over his face and through his hair. "Are you— God damn. How long?"

"Over twelve hours." Stark's hands stuff into his pockets. "Look, he can barely stand up straight, let alone walk. We send him home to New York – and it's you and me. We go there, get them, and go home. Figure it out from there."

"Oh, simple," Sam snarks.

It's a bad plan. They have no idea what they're up against. Even worse, neither does he—and he's  _been there_.

Conversation apparently over, they get into the vehicle: Stark in the front passenger seat, and Sam next to Barnes in the back.

"JARVIS, you know where to go."

Barnes is almost too tired and now too wired to notice that the vehicle turns itself on, maneuvers its own steering wheel, and sets its own speed. It drives itself without anyone in the driver's seat. Even he, who has pretty much seen it all, marvels at  _how fucking cool_ it is.

"You okay?" Sam asks.

Barnes tears his attention away from the  _self-driving vehicle_ , turns his neck to look at Sam, nods, and doesn't admit how much that all hurts his neck. "I'm coming with you."

Sam makes a face. "Yeah. You're in the same car. That's kinda how it works."

"I heard you out there." Barnes gestures at his ear. "That's kinda how it works."

"Yeah, no, you're not," Stark butts in, a distant, unseen voice from the front of the vehicle. "You're going home."

 _You don't know where my home is,_  Barnes feels like saying, then realizes he's never going back to that little street and the loud wooden stairs and the tiny flat with the view of the cobblestone, ivied courtyard and annoying streetlight.

"I can—"

He barely gets those two words out, before Stark flips around in his seat and stares at Barnes from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

"I told Rogers I'd take care of you. So. That's what I'm doing. You're going home, not neck deep in your old territory."

He's supposed to be touched or something by the first part, and probably also insulted or something by the last part, but the first part more than makes him mad. "I don't care what the fuck you told whoever."

"See, that's not even a sentence. Know when to stop."

Stark turns away, like they're done or something. Barnes sees the glow of phone's screen and hears tell-tale tippity-tapping.

"You really think walking in blind is going to help anyone?" Barnes asks.

"Uh, no," Tony retorts. "We'll be flying, in fact, while you're flying to New York."

He pushes away pride and a heap of defensiveness. Natasha's out there – more than capable, more than dangerous. But she and Steve are out there, with all the unknowns and maybes and  _ifs ifs ifs ifs_. He won't be—can't be—anywhere but right here.

Worst case: he ditches them and heads out on his own. That truly is worst case. Worst of the worst. He really doesn't want it to get that far.

"Let me help," he pleads.  _Pleads_.

Finally, Sam speaks up. "Tony. He's right."

"Christ, fine. JARVIS, head to the safe house." Stark spins back around, index finger pointed. "All you're going to do is feed us intel. Ass planted. Got it?"

It actually sounds…not bad. Given the circumstances.

"Like milk," Barnes replies.

Stark pauses, and his eyebrows disappear under the frame of his sunglasses. "I'm not impressed that you know that."

Barnes sags into the corner of the door and the seat, relieved. He notices Sam's stare and doesn't have the energy to address it. There's one thing he wants to get a jump start on, as much as possible.

"I'm gonna need—"

"Maps," Sam interrupts, accurately. "We've met."

Despite it all, Barnes pays Sam a miniscule smirk. "Who the hell are you?"

It's worth it to hear Sam laugh.

***

"We should've gotten you crutches."

Though meant genuinely, Sam still gets himself a nasty look from Barnes. That's all fine and good until the elevator  _dings_ at the twelfth floor, and Barnes hesitates long enough for Sam to know that Barnes knows: he can't make it to the suite's door.

With an eye roll, Sam drapes Barnes' left arm around his neck and steps out, tugging Barnes along with him. It's a testament to how out of it Barnes is that he lets Sam do both.

"You don't need—"

"Let's go, Stupid Fuckhead," Sam interrupts.

Sam counts the steps to the door, all fourteen of them. Barnes is quiet about it, tight-jawed and eyes closed, while Sam is somehow complicit in this effort in ridiculousness.

"You should be in a God damn hospital."

Barnes doesn't answer, until Sam has deposited him on a gray couch inside the safe house. "Not a regular one? I'm fine."

Sam's reply is too quick to guard against pure and total honesty. "Your idea of 'fine' is fucked up beyond belief."

"Tell me how you really feel."

Sam sits next to him. With Tony downstairs, there's no better time than to tell Barnes exactly how he really feels. "That was a shitty thing you did."

"Be more specific."

"Yeah," Sam nods, "you're pretty good at compounding fuck-ups. Brazil."

After all this time, Sam's not too bad at reading the situation that is Barnes. Right now, he reads that  _Bucky_ had never had that problem, and it kills him that he can't snap that person back into existence.

"Look," Sam redirects, "no one's mad. Especially after…"

The last three months compared to the last day helps to put things into extreme perspective.

Barnes fishes. "Natasha?"

"That's between you two. But, really,  _damn_. Of all the people to cut out, Natasha's one hell of a choice."

Barnes takes in a deep breath. "I thought… Don't worry about it."

Sam lets that hang, while he sifts through what he knows. The nasty text message almost right after Brazil. Knowing how angry and bitter Sharon was the last time he'd seen her. Both of them SHIELD. It's easy.

"Nat wouldn't do that.  _None_  of us would do that to you."

Barnes screws up his face in what looks like genuine, disgusted shock. "How the hell—"

"It used to be my job. Okay. People puzzles."

That look wipes clear off Barnes' face. "'Used to be'?"

Sam drops eye contact, and his hands suddenly become interesting. "2016. It caught up. Can't really help people, when I'm out there kil…" It occurs to Sam that he's explaining this to someone it doesn't need explained to. "You get it."

Really, all Sam expects is some level of nonverbal agreement, maybe a "yeah, no shit." Usually, Barnes' well of givable emotional resources is bone dry, and  _that's okay_. It's part of the deal.

"During the War, HYDRA sent this little girl out with a grenade. She got close to the unit. I killed her." Although Barnes' voice breaks into a whisper at the end, Sam doesn't think it's because of grief or remorse. "It changed everything. Even if nothing else had ever happened."

Part of Sam had died that day in the sky, an RPG and body parts of his best friend reflected in his eyewear. No one he knows now will ever know the whole version of him, like he'll never know the whole Steve, the whole Barnes, or the whole Natasha. It doesn't make any of them less real, only different than who they had once been.

"I think you're a good counselor," Barnes tries.

Sam grins, because they're both sitting here, both alive, and this wreck of a person is trying to make Sam's life better. "Do you even really know what a counselor  _does_?"

Sam earns a rare smile – a glimpse into the far gone past. "No."

"Thought so."

"Did I ever tell you about Gernhardt?"

"Dude, you can barely talk. Save it for later."

Like Barnes ever listens.

***

Tony tosses a tablet Barnes' way. "You asked for maps. Take a look at these."

After a momentary glance, Barnes recognizes the area as the subterranean complex, Kozerska, and Lake Kręta. An orange waypoint marks each location with a letter - Y for the complex, Z for Kozerska, and X for Lake Kręta.

That's interesting.

"Do you have their mission plan?" Barnes asks.

Tony crosses his arms and leans back against the kitchen island. "They didn't file one."

Barnes looks to Sam in disbelief. In over seventy years, he's never seen an agency make mission plans  _optional._

"Not even with Maria?" Sam questions.

"Nope. All Romanoff told me was that they were going where Barnes went."

Which could be any number of places. Not really helpful.

Sam blows out a breath and regards Barnes with stony weariness. "We've had issues. They have intel on our missions. Might explain why you ran into trouble. Discretion, you know?"

Barnes bites back a " _still_?" "Okay. I'll see what they left here."

Tony pulls a chair up to the island and opens about five thin laptops, while Sam stays put and flips on his tablet.

He thinks he already knows that Steve marked the map, and he thinks he already knows where they went. He's not having these two go there, until he's absolutely certain.

Barnes leans back against the couch and digs into the tablet's contents. He swipes through map and after map, finding many of his own – the ones from a few days ago, and, surprisingly, some from 2014. Natasha had gotten into his cloud account and pulled them.

He ekes out a scratchy laugh. He hadn't thought to change the password after Kiruna.

"What?" Sam asks.

Barnes swipes through more images, seeing that none of them have been notated beyond his old scribbles. "Nothing worth talking about."

Sam goes quiet for about a split second. "So, you and Sharon don't get along?"

Barnes pauses mid-swipe, eyes searching thin air to make sense of that.

He's heard that name before – Sharon. Steve's Sharon. The one HYDRA got to so they could get to Steve. He saw her once outside Steve's apartment—another bottle blonde out of thousands—but he doesn't know her.

…Reliant has blonde hair. Similar build. Similar height. Can't be.

Without thinking through the implications, he asks, "Who? I mean, what?"

"You and Carter. Do you get along?"

 _Sharon. Carter_.

He doesn't think he ever knew Sharon's last name was –

" _Carter_?!" Barnes exclaims, his brain so far behind his mouth. "Steve totally fucking  _would_."

"Yeppers," Stark replies absent-mindedly, more focused on his computers. "Oddly, not as weird as it sounds. Well: sounded."

"Dude." Sam lets that stupid word hang for a second. "You've worked with her for how many months, and you never got her last name?"

Maybe it's the lack of sleep, or the head injury, or the way his brain is a pan of scrambled, soggy eggs at this point – but  _what the hell_.

Steve's ex-girlfriend is Reliant. Reliant is Peggy's granddaughter or something.

All those times she'd stonewalled him weren't about Insight. They were about HYDRA and what had happened to Steve. He  _gets_ that, plain as fucking day.

Sam hadn't been lying about Natasha.

 _Natasha_.

 _Oh, fuck_.

He'd gotten it all wrong.

"Wait," Sam laughs, "did you even get her  _first_ name?"

Barnes looks at him, but not before he can wipe the giant oh-fuck-me expression off his face. "She was mean."

In some sort of overjoyed disbelief, Stark spins around in his chair. The corners of his pressed-together lips quiver. "Oh. Do tell. Because I kinda, you know, can't wait to."

He wants to sigh, but his throat hurts, and he wants to shake his head, but his neck is a fucking red-hot rod iron, and he wants to say "fuck you," but Stark is still Howard's kid.

"You never got her  _name_?" Sam repeats in genuine disbelief. "After eight months?"

Barnes  _will_  and  _does_  say "fuck you" to Sam.

***

Not that Sam's counting or anything, but five hours and six minutes after leaving the hospital, while Tony does Tony shit to Barnes' arm, Barnes announces, "They went to the base – Location Y."

Barnes slides his tablet across the kitchen island, his right arm stretching out with it, and lays his head down.

"I told you not to move," Tony snaps. "Also: you feel like explaining that, John Edward?"

Sam stands up and stretches his arms, cracks his neck, and shakes out his achy knee. His wingpack's ready to go. After he grabs a couple pieces of gear, they can be out of here in no time at all.

The only problem: it's 1700 and dark outside. It won't be any better in Poland, let alone in enemy territory. It's a good twelve hours until sunlight.

Without raising his head or sitting up, Barnes mumbles, "Steve did the map. Who's John Edward?"

Tony stays completely silent, staring at Barnes with unblinking, round eyes.

"He can't see you do that," Sam points out. "You know that, right?"

"I'm trying to light him on fire. You're ruining my concentration."

Although Barnes doesn't say anything, let alone make any sort of sound, Sam can all but hear a would-be groan as he sits up, dragging the tablet back across the counter. He shoves it over to Tony.

"I told you to  _not move_."

Barnes holds back a damning glare, his nose and lip twitching. If Tony was  _anyone else_.

Sam walks over and peers over Tony's shoulder, a tangled mass of discolored wires, and a layer of metal plates. The map displayed on Barnes' tablet is the first one from hours ago.

"Y is 'yes,' X is 'no,' and Z is 'rendezvous.' Steve and I came up with it in the '40s. Natasha pulled my research on the underground base. That's where they went."

"That seem weird to you?" Sam asks. It does to him.

Barnes rubs his right hand over his face. Like a reverse Etch-a-Sketch, he looks more tired when his hand falls away. "I don't know. It made sense to them, and it's probably where I'd go. Steve knows the place."

"Good enough for me," Tony pipes up. "Give me thirty to get the arm back together. We go tomorrow before sunrise. And by 'we' – you know who I mean."

Barnes doesn't argue. For now.

Sam spends those thirty minutes watching a magnificent scene unfold in the kitchen.

Barnes is half-sprawled across the island, head once again laying on his right arm. The way his chest rises and falls suggests that he's fast asleep, even as Tony fits his left arm back together a piece at a time.

Maybe, at some point, with some luck, they can all end up home, in the same place and on the same page. Maybe.

Finally, Tony stands up, scoots his chair back, and slaps Barnes on the back. "All done, Sleeping Beauty."

Tony wanders away, without realizing that Barnes didn't wake up. Sam's pretty sure he's not dead  _again_ , if only by the way his rounded back rises and falls with easy, steady breaths.

Nope. He's not sleeping there, like that.

Tony disappears into a room – a bathroom, a bedroom, a whatever-room – while Sam pads to the kitchen and puts himself as in-front-of Barnes as he can manage.

"B."

No progress made there, Sam dares to land a hand on top of Barnes' right shoulder and give it a little shake. "Barnes."

"What," the idiot croaks, even as he flinches that shoulder away from Sam's prodding. "I'm fine."

Some days, Sam thinks Barnes is equivalent to a kid's See 'n Say toy: pick a topic, crank the knob, and enjoy shit like "I'm fine," "fuck you," "whatever," "fuck you some more," "'kay," "fuck," and "how does my hair look."

Sam cranks the knob. "You're not sleeping here. C'mon. Move to the couch."

"'Kay." Barnes says that but  _doesn't move_.

"Your hair's messed up," Sam tries. It's not a lie, even.

Barnes' brow furrows and his right hand stiffly comes up to check. It's a tad longer than he usually has it, a little dirty and oily, and a mess of cowlicks and flat spots. "It is," he mumbles.

"It's  _really_ bad. You should go fix it," Sam suggests, knowing  _exactly_ what's going to happen. "Bathroom's riiiight over there."

Like clockwork, Barnes drags himself off the kitchen island, winces as he puts weight on his left leg, and blearily blinks at the kitchen, then turns at blinks at the living room. Sam comes up behind him and, with two hands, directs Barnes toward the living room: straight ahead.

"C'mon, man," Sam shamelessly manipulates. "I've got your back."

"I'm tired," Barnes says, everything about him screaming  _barely awake_.

He should be in a fucking hospital.

Sam helps ease Barnes down onto the sofa, not a single effort at a fight or a mean word spared.

As Barnes stretches out, Sam sits at the end, tosses Barnes' shoes onto the floor, and drags a blanket over both of them. It won't be comfortable like home, but it won't be bad, even with Barnes' legs draped over Sam's knees.

_Click!_

Sam looks to his right, only to find Tony smirking and holding his phone up, as if he's –

Taking a picture. It'll last longer, right.

"Way too cute," Tony jabs, though light-hearted. "Can't believe the hair ploy worked."

Sam snorts, then shuffles down into the couch, getting more comfortable. "HYDRA wouldn't give him a comb."

Tony puts his phone away, while his other hand comes up with a snack-pack of nuts. He pops an almond into his mouth. "Tragic. We leave at 5 a.m."

Sam thinks to set his alarm for 0400: it'll only take him ten minutes flat to gear up. The rest of that time is meant to talk Barnes down, off the inevitable "they're the only people I have, and I'm god damn fucking going" ledge.

Sam wakes up at 0300, the alarm unneeded. His neck aches from its awkward sprawl, and his legs are numb from sitting in the same position for – oh, wow, eight whole hours. It'd been a decent sleep.

With a glance to his left, Sam sees Barnes: absolutely dead to the world, but alive and breathing. In the dark, it even looks like his color is better, some bruising and swelling down to almost nothing.

Sam slides off the couch and finds Tony already awake and based in the kitchen, working between a sea of laptops and tablets.

Tony's eyes briefly flick up. "Still nothing from them. It's been nearly 24 hours."

So: something is genuinely, seriously wrong. Even on Steve's worst day, he's still capable, still Captain America. Add Natasha and Sharon into that mix, and HYDRA shouldn't have stood a chance.

Add the other Steve—the one from a day and a half ago in Berlin—into that mix… Sam wonders if that's who happened to them. He prays that it's not.

"05, still?" Sam asks.

Tony nods, attention back to his devices.

Sam takes a long, hot shower, gets dressed in black combat clothing without the gear, and plops in front of the couch. He turns on the TV but finds the news is still fixated on what the hell Captain America was doing attacking civilians in Berlin.

Sam turns it right back off, then spends over an hour reviewing maps of the SAR area. Behind him, Barnes quietly snores, even when his left arm extends out, elbow locked, and whacks Sam in the head.

At 0445, Sam returns the favor by flipping on all the lights and then dropping a few pieces of light gear onto Barnes' stomach. Barnes doesn't complain: only sits up, letting the gear drop to the floor, and then pushes himself to his feet.

His left leg wobbles.

Sam only woke him up to let him know that they were leaving, so he wouldn't wake up twenty hours from now and not know what the hell happened.

It's ridiculous that Sam even has to say, "No, you're not going."

Barnes sags, every ounce of energy leaching out of his body. "Keep your cam on, comm in. I'll do what I can from here."

Sam doesn't buy it: too easy. He gives Barnes a shitty look, clearly conveying that he knows Barnes is full of it.

"I'm dizzy just standing here," Barnes quietly says, eye contact a mile and a half away.

Barnes doesn't play games, and he rarely outright lies. Sam also knows that very little in this world can stop Barnes from going after the two most important people in his life. The fact that he's willing to stay behind tells a story.

"Are you going to be okay here alone?" Sam asks, though he thinks he already knows the answer is  _no_.

If they can pull in Rhodes, one of them can stay here with Barnes. It would only set them back a half hour, at most.

Incredulous, Barnes rolls his eyes and limps toward the kitchen, apparently done with the conversation.

"It's a fair question," Tony cuts in, not harshly.

"Priorities," Barnes responds, not kindly.

"You're one of them," Tony counters.

It's weird, Sam thinks, watching them play ball.

A rare glimpse of a gamut of thoughts pass over Barnes' face. He's finally learned to watch what he says. "I'll be fine," he decides to say. "They might not be."

Tony takes a moment to consider, then shrug, and then look to Sam. Tony wiggles a raised wrist adorned with a red and gold bracelet. "I'm ready whenever you are."

Sam glances at Barnes, in time to see him discreetly drop into a black office chair and seem exhausted for all the effort it took.

This is ridiculous.

"If HYDRA finds this place, you know you're screwed, right," Sam states.

"If HYDRA finds this place, we're all pretty fucked," Barnes answers. "Go."

They go, every one of Sam's instincts blaring huge neon signs that read "no" and "stay."

On street level, Sam stops outside the building's door. Tony power walks ahead, not realizing he's alone until he's nearly half a block ahead.

Streetlights hum. One or two vehicles  _swish_ by them, Berlin still asleep as the morning begins to stretch.

"I can't. Not like this."

Hands in pockets, Tony strolls back to Sam, shoulders infuriatingly relaxed, and an amused grin pulling at his lips. "Relax. JARVIS already called Eicher. She's on her way to set up shop."

Sam stifles a laugh, before he remembers the last encounter she'd had with Barnes. But: it's an ally, a friend, and a doctor. "Oh, he's going to be  _thrilled_."

"We should probably tell her to not be too  _mean_."

It's not even an hour later when Barnes' crackly voice comes through their comms:  _"I hate you both."_

***

Less than an hour after Sam and Stark leave the safe house, the door opens without a knock.

Immediately, Barnes rolls off the sofa, grabs a handgun from under the thick cushions, and aims it at the door.

Eicher freezes in the doorway, hands slowly raising, an odd smirk on her face. Her leather work bag slips from her shoulder and lands in a lump on the floor.

He doesn't lower the weapon. "How did you know to come here?"

"Stark called," she answers, voice even and sure. "He wasn't comfortable leaving you here alone. It's not even been two days since the attack."

Barnes lifts his eyebrows, at once both a prompt and a cue that his patience is waning.

"Drawing, head, dairy, timber."

Those are the magic words of the week. Before lowering his sidearm, Barnes taps his comm and informs his new team that he hates them both. Though a strong statement, it's not an entirely incorrect one.

He's  _fine_.

"You're welcome," Stark replies. "Play nice."

Barnes doesn't bother replying to him. As he sticks his weapon under the sofa and painstakingly pushes himself to his feet, he regards Eicher. "I refuse care. Leave."

Her response to that is to slide her bag into the flat, step inside, and then close the door. "After a physical exam, I will. Promise."

Not so long ago—barely a day ago—he trusted Eicher with his life. She had been firm, honest, and open with him after Death Valley, despite their rough start. He liked her.

The incident from earlier today had shaken him in a now-rare, previously-familiar way. If he wants people in his life who shove unwanted needles into his body, he knows exactly where to find them.

All said: if she tries that again, he can easily overpower her, even in his limited condition. If she looks him over, maybe Sam and Stark will shut the hell up about it.

Barnes sits on the sofa. "Thirty minutes, and you're gone."

She gives him a close-lipped smile, picks up her bag, and approaches him. "I'll start with your throat."

He watches her unzip the bag, pull out a pair of latex gloves, and snap them over her hands.

She tugs out his ear piece, then peels off the antibiotic tape that covers the incision across his neck. He wouldn't say it hurts, but the incision burns. Barnes glances at her face and can't read the expression.

Eicher throws the tape away. "May I palpate your throat?"

His nod earns him all ten of her cold, gloved fingers palpating his neck in a gentle, roaming pattern. A few spots feel unusually tender, more so whenever he swallows.

"Swallow."

He does. It hurts the bottom of his throat.

"Pain, tenderness?"

The question is standard. TV doctors ask it of their TV patients. HYDRA doctors ask it of their HYDRA assets, and those assets owe those HYDRA doctors a brief, honest "yes" or "no."

This whole thing is like that and not like TV. For a moment, the room tilts sideways and loses its sharpness.

"Pain or tenderness?" she repeats, tone sharp.

"Yeah, both," he says, uncomfortable but determined to find a way to be… _normal_. "It's only been a day."

She presses in a few more places and then sticks the eartips of her stethoscope into her ears. "Is your voice usually better than this or worse?"

He's almost used to the scratchy unevenness and random breaking of words. More importantly, it's a poorly worded question, and he's nervous enough that he wants to ease his own tension.

"I don't know; I usually have one," he says, trying more for impudence than derision. "I love sounding like I'm thirteen again."

The stethoscope diaphragm presses against his chest. "You didn't have a voice when you were thirteen? That's weird. Deep breaths."

He obliges but doesn't keep the banter going. In his head, he thinks of random words, purposefully out of sync with his deep breaths.  _Duck, ball, book, paint, window, tree, maze, red_  –

Not red. He'd been thinking of Natasha's lipstick, but it doesn't matter. Not red.

"Your heart palpitated," Eicher calmly notes. "Is that normal?"

"Oh, darlin', you have no idea" crosses his mind. Maybe when he was twenty-five. "No, I thought of something," he says instead. "It's fine."

"Oh, where'd you get your MD?"

Barnes doesn't take the bait. He lets her move the diaphragm to his back, and he keeps taking deep breaths.  _Candy, chips, fries, pizza, shrimp, water, sand, shell, gas, car, road –_

Eicher steps back, hangs the stethoscope over her neck, and then peels the tape from another incision. Her fingers crawl to the back of his neck. That one stings, too. He wants to ask why they went into his neck from both sides, but he wants her out of here more.

Eicher stands back and snaps off her gloves. "You have swelling on both incisions. That's why you need a good, intravenous antibiotic."

Although he hears her, he's distracted by her nail polish. It's red: bright, chipped. At the hospital yesterday morning, the color had been blue—smooth, fresh—and her left thumb had had a perceptible, deep divot on the tip. Today, he can't see it.

He thinks back to their stand-off yesterday: so completely unlike her.

"I'll take that as an 'okay,'" she says.

Out of the blue, Barnes comments, "I never thanked you."

"For what?" she asks, in an off-hand, disinterested way that shakes his instincts.

Sometimes, those instincts are damn near all he has left. He listens to them.

"Talking to me about Steve, back in '16. It helped me find perspective."

A transitory smile crosses Eicher's face, and her eyes meet his. "I'm happy it did."

Thing is: they hadn't talked in 2016.  _She_ had been professional, open, and honest;  _he'd_ acted like a bratty, petulant five-year-old.

Any other day, this wouldn't have been much of a problem.

Walking, right now, isn't so easy. His neck muscles ache and spasm, and his dull, ever-present headache has been more like a drill boring into his skull. He runs out of breath faster than Steve used to. He hadn't gone after the only family he still has because he knew, and he knows, that his body probably won't hold out for long.

He watches her walk to the kitchen island, plop her bag on top of it, and begin to rummage through. She pulls out a plastic-wrapped syringe, IV catheter, and a small, unlabeled glass bottle.

Panic grips him: a full-blown attack of cold sweat, seizing lungs, and an uncontrollable rush of memories. The top of his right hand stings with those memories. That tiny spot was their most reliable control point; using it, they could do anything with him.

The panic winches around his chest. The Winter Soldier wouldn't have let it affect him. The person he is today wants to explode – literally explode like a literal bomb and take the building and this bitch down with him.

They're never going to let him go.

Those items in her hands, Eicher gives him a tight smile. The bottle isn't filled with antibiotics; it's a sedative that will knock him out for days. Game over. That's what yesterday had been about: she'd blown her mission.

"Are you all right?" she asks.

"Yeah," he responds. Not today. They're not getting him today. "Tired. That's all. Sam says I should be in a hospital; he's probably right. Don't tell him that."

She steps back over and sits down next to him on the sofa. She takes his right hand into her lap.

His throat locks up.

It's reminiscent of another time. It reminds his body of those times. The reminder is enough to trip something in his head, and, without realizing what he's doing, he's pushed Eicher away and has escaped to the other side of the room.

 _Fuck_. He might've blown it.

She's still sitting, though. The apartment is still quiet.

He stares out the window, barely seeing Berlin, all of it washed in pre-dawn darkness. Across the street, seven stories up in another building, a shadowed sniper has a rifle pointed squarely at him. Barnes looks down at the handful of toy cars scurrying down the street far, far below. He pretends not to see the black SUVs that sit parallel to the building's curb, waiting. Surrounding.

Bits of dread pile up in the back of his mind.

"You're not invincible. Your body still needs support. Sam's not wrong."

"I know that" somehow tumbles past his lips, not much of a voice behind the words. Hundreds of needles have pierced his skin; hundreds of times, HYDRA's ideas and wants pulsed through his veins.

His comm piece is with her. Even if Sam or Stark try to reach him, they'll figure he fell asleep, that Eicher's taking care of him.

Natasha, Sharon, Steve, Sam, and Stark aren't coming back here for days. Hill's on another continent.

He's alone.

He reminds himself of April 2014: a broken arm, no memories, no friends, no world to claim as his own. He'd barely had himself, and he'd survived. He'd made it to this point in time.

He reminds himself of a few days ago: caught completely off guard, hundreds of miles from help, wounded and hunted by someone faster and arguably stronger. He'd survived, and he'd escaped.

In the window's reflection, Eicher stands confidently, syringe held like a cigarette between her fingers. Her next statement isn't one he expected, but it's one that threatens to make him sick.

"What can I do to make it different this time?"

Anger replaces the panic. They  _know_. They've always  _known_  – what they were doing. How much they violated.

 _Push it away_.

Barnes turns. He decides on a plan.

"Not much," he concedes with a small smile. He steps toward her, arms at his side, body relaxed, nonthreatening in every way he knows. Only a half-meter or so away, he reaches up to run his fingers through her red hair.

She's good: doesn't flinch, doesn't question, doesn't move back. She's sliding together scraps of a simple puzzle and reaching an unmistakable conclusion.

He thinks of Natasha and demolishes the personal space between them. "I missed you," he whispers as his lips brush her ear.

It's almost natural, when he takes both of her hands with his – not aggressively or forcefully but how he might if it was Natasha, or a lifetime ago, Anna. The syringe is still in her right hand; again, she's missed her chance to use it.

"We—" she protests, finally revealing uncertainty.

Barnes steps her backwards toward the wall, gentle but firm, face still close to hers. A memory of Bucky says, "We should."

Besides the sniper and the team on the street, he's sure the door is covered. He'll only have a few seconds to flip the kill switch – and then fight his way out.

Her back hits the wall. He kisses her on the lips, and she reciprocates forcefully, desperately, convincingly committed to seeing this through. His left hand still around her right, he brings his own right hand to her cheek, next to her ear, presses down, and catches the edge of a photostatic veil.

Her eyes widen, and he only gives her enough time for that. The needle of syringe slides into her thigh, and he depresses the plunger with one quick push.

That's it.

Barnes turns away from her and calmly, very calmly, walks across the room: past the sofa with the tousled throw and pilled pillow, and past the kitchen island.

The living room window shatters. A bullet  _hisses_  past the back of his neck.

Calmly, very calmly, he walks into the kitchen. Another bullet takes out the black toaster; it's not a bad shot, but rather a shot fired by a person unfamiliar with shooting the person who'd trained HYDRA's best.

He goes to the too-large pantry.

The flat's front door  _BANGS_  open.

The pantry door swings open to a floor-to-ceiling server rack. Barnes presses three red kill switches, ducks under the island, takes the loaded FN-RAL assault rifle from the spice shelf there, and comes right back up, shooting and walking.

It's only a six-person team inside this small flat, and it's only six people that he kills, and only a seventh slumped dead against the far back wall, a too-powerful syringe stuck in her thigh.

That sniper keeps shooting, and Barnes simply drops the rifle, grabs one of the black go-bags from the wall-mounted coat hook, and leaves the flat.

Just in time, too: the smoke from the sizzling server rack is getting to be a bit strong.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 7: The Only Luck of the Day._

/***/

When Barnes' knees hit silt, he trudges to the muddy bank, his feet sinking into the ground. Seconds pull away, sluggish and slow, like him. He focuses on the tree line, one step at a time, and holds back a fit of coughs his body compulsively tries to spit out.

His hand aches. His thigh and neck burn. His right arm is numb. His lungs feel stripped raw. He wants to collapse and sleep for days.

More than anything, he wants Natasha or Sam. He needs a friend to say _we’ve got this_ , _you’re not alone_.

Barnes steps into the forest, looks ahead about ten meters, and knows he’s going to die.

It’s a cloudy night: still late, still dark, without much moonlight. He doesn’t need daylight to see the shadowed, dominating metal-suited figure with glowing red eyes, standing directly in front of him.

“That’s the last time I’m pulling you out of a river this week.”

Barnes hears the male voice but barely listens.

With his left hand, he draws his sidearm again. He puts his finger on the trigger and lets his arm hang at his side.

One of them is going to die here. It won’t be the guy wearing a metal suit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, not everything is explained or answered - but what would be the fun in that? Hopefully, this chapter explained enough to settle some nerves. Thanks for reading!


	7. The Only Luck of the Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm not HYDRA, Barnes. I'm U.S. military. I'm on your side," the man says, sickeningly patient. "Put the weapon down."
> 
> Barnes can't get a read on this guy or on this situation. What he knows is that every situation for the past however many days has come equipped with trap doors, and he's sick and f**king tired of falling through them.
> 
> Something important snaps inside of him. It might be the wall that he's carefully built for four years. It's the one that separates the person he wants to be from the person he's been. With that wall gone, Barnes looks to his instincts for instructions, but they're silent.
> 
> Barnes aims his sidearm at the man's chest. It's not for show. He will.
> 
> Barnes runs from HYDRA, not knowing his friends from his enemies. Tony and Sam converge onto the base in Poland, hoping to find Natasha, Steve, and Sharon - but instead finding a technology that could end their world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: attempted suicide and major character death (temporary)

The thing about running from HYDRA is that it's not really that easy. Without a doubt, they have people on the roof, on the ground, and in place at every possible egress point. There isn't an easy or careless way out of this.

But there is a way.

Inside one of the building's six elevators, Barnes drops a standard-issue static charge to kill the surveillance camera. Then, he pries open the inner doors with his hands. Instantly, the car lurches to a stop; the moment it does, he trips the outer's door safety latch and forces the doors open.

He's inordinately relieved to see (1) the car is between floors and (2) there is enough room between the car and the shaft for him to slide through and climb atop the car.

Once on top, he spots the car's maintenance control panel and flicks the switches for "close" and "run." The car lurches back into service, gliding upward. Meanwhile, he steps off it and onto a metal access ladder.

His left thigh muscles tremble already. That's nice.

A rung at a time, Barnes silently climbs downward, careful but quick. HYDRA's operatives  _will_  check the shafts, once they realize surveillance shows him going in but never coming out. The advantage is that they'll think he went for the roof.

Faded numbers mark the floors as he passes by them – 8, 7, 6. The elevator car slithers by him, centimeters from his body as it travels up and down. All he can do is ignore it – and the bubbling memory of a mission to assassinate a pro-democracy advocate in Soviet Russia long, long ago.

Hand over hand, step after step, he clears every floor down to the basement in under three long minutes.

On the first level of the basement, he drops into the elevator pit, pries open the access doors, and crawls up onto a dirty concrete floor. Left leg burning, the severed muscles hopping, he uses his right leg to push himself clear of the elevator shaft.

He hops to his feet, a steadying hand placed against the concrete wall. Only a bit longer.

His options are to find the service elevator to access the rest of the basement, or chance the stairwell. He decides on the stairwell, at the other end of the floor, because all of the elevators will be closely monitored.

On the way there, he passes a maintenance room – and he wonders.

Barnes forces open the locked door and slips into the small, dark room. His eyes adjust and can't believe the pile of fresh, plastic-wrapped Aramark uniforms they see. Every once in a while, the stars align and shit  _works out_.

A disguise won't help him if he runs into HYDRA soldiers, but it'll sure as hell get him by cameras. Until HYDRA decides to kill everyone they see.

A sick chill twines around him. He can't afford that, not right now.

From the go bag, Barnes grabs credit cards, cash, and ID, shoving it all deep into his pant pockets. He makes sure to take the holstered sidearm from the bag, and he secures it to the back of his waistband.

He sifts through the pile of clothes until he finds an extra-large set. He pulls on a scratchy, stiff navy blue, button down shirt and a baggy pair of matching pants over his own clothes. He puts on a blue cap, grabs a dirty mop, and walks casually out of the maintenance room.

He forces his left leg to move without a limp. It's agony, like muscles are tearing, but he doesn't care, so long as it gets him out of here unnoticed.

The stairwell is empty, gray, and cold. He takes the steps all the way to the bottom, down three flights. Long before reaching the bottom, his right hand aches from gripping the rail so tightly and supporting so much of his weight.

Barnes left-shoulders his way through a locked door marked K4. He enters an expansive, dank area with colorful, thick pipes extending floor to ceiling. Steam blasts and hisses, mixing with the sound of rushing water and the echo of voices.

Barnes walks along the edge of the room, identifying the owners of the voices: workers, not soldiers. He ignores them and hopes that they ignore him.

He turns a corner and spots water storage tanks: two behemoth, blue cylinders that each stretch two stories high. They share a common 45" red intake pipe that branches out into the back of each tank. That pipe is directly connected to the Spree.

Water from the Spree gets pumped into the tanks and used to cool not only this building but four others in the plaza. Simply: it's a way out. Like the schematics said. He'd pulled them when this assignment first began in June 2017,  _just in case_ a rule he follows without fail.

He has no expectation that HYDRA knows about this egress point. Eight minutes into this mess, and it doesn't seem like they've figured anything out.

He's about to give them a Big Fucking Hint.

As he walks, he purposefully passes a bright red box attached to the wall. In the middle of that bright red box, surrounded by words like "Scheibe einschlagen" and "Knopf tief drücken," a black button waits to be pressed.

He presses it deeply and doesn't stop walking.

 _Click-click-click_ : fire doors release their auto-locks and close.

Bright, pulsing lights flash.

A high-pitched, very annoying fire alarm pierces the cavernous room.

Workers groan and moan and debate if they should leave or not.

He doesn't do it to save himself, or to create a diversion to help his escape. If anything, it puts him at extreme risk: HYDRA will know it's not a fire, and HYDRA will source it right back to this location.

He does it so that HYDRA can't quietly kill everyone in this building. He does it so that authorities will come.

If SHIELD hadn't disconnected the fire alarm in the safe house, it wouldn't have been necessary.

That already-ticking clock has sped up, and his time is running.

Barnes searches for and spots a thin red ladder that leads to a red maintenance catwalk. Before the annoyed, semi-evacuating workers get curious about him, Barnes walks to the ladder, leans his decoy mop against the wall, and climbs up, steady as he goes.

His right shoulder aches with every reach, but Stark had done an amazing job on his left arm. It's quiet and smooth, the plates operating in sync, the movements easy—better than it's been since Rumlow's EMG over a year ago.

Barnes swings onto the catwalk and advances toward the tank closest to the workers. He hops the rail and leaps onto the tank, headed straight for a round access hatch.

Right on time, the workers spot him. Loud, upset voices cut through the blasting alarm. He hears "Hey!" " _halt_!" and " _anhalten_!" Amusingly, he also hears " _bist du dumm_ " – "are you stupid?" – and he thinks to mutter "I hope not" in German.

With his left arm, Barnes rips the hatch open, revealing a man-sized hole and sloshing, dark water. He lets the hatch go and ignores it as it  _scraaaaaapes_  down the tank and then  _claaaaangs_  against the floor. The workers cuss up a storm and yell about shutting down the intake system, fire alarm be damned.

_Perfect._

A calm breath inhaled, Barnes drops feet first through the opening and plunges into pitch black, ice cold water. Immediately, the twisting water removes from him control of his own body, powerfully pushing him forward and down.

The maintenance jacket tears away from his body. It crosses his mind that he's jumped into a giant fucking washing machine.

In his mind's eye, he can see exactly where he is in the tank. He knows his speed and direction, and he knows the building schematics compared to what he'd seen before jumping in. There are times he wishes he could power off this part of his brain; now is one of the times when he appreciates the HYDRA in him.

Barnes reaches out with his left hand and catches the edge of the horizontal intake pipe. His fingers dig into the metal, fighting against the fervent rushing of the Spree's water. Immediately, he whips his feet around, kicks through a metal baffle, wedges his body inside the pipe, and waits for the workers to turn off the pump.

It only takes about fifteen seconds for that to happen. When it does, the pipe no longer suctions new water from the river, and that makes his escape as simple as possible.

He swims briskly, as fast as he can. The City will order the tanks to be emptied, and, when his body isn't found, they'll search the pipe. HYDRA will immediately know it was him, and they'll know to search the Spree.

He needs to get the hell out of here before that happens.

It takes a good seven minutes for him to come out the other side, depositing himself out of the intake pipe and into the dark, murky depths of the Spree.

His oxygen level is more than good, and he intends to use the time he has to swim far, far away from this part of Berlin.

Above, he already hears the hollow, booming  _whapping_ of a helicopter and the  _roar_  of a small boat engine. He knows who it is. One of these days, he's going to find someone decently in charge and ask why they still want him so badly.

He kicks off the pipe, butterfly kicks to gain speed, and launches into a swift breaststroke, parallel to the river bottom, headed northeast toward Berlin Hauptbahnhof. It's a two-kilometer swim, give or take.

He doesn't think about what could happen, like a hand grabbing his foot, or an underwater team surrounding him, or an EMP rendering him helpless. He focuses on swimming and on distance, keeping time in his head.

That focus precludes him from noticing a large, dark shadow pass overhead.

It's still daylight, and there's only so much HYDRA can do with the eyes of Berlin watching. After what they tried with the attack the other day, bringing a helicopter out is more than pushing their luck.

Maybe that's why nothing happens.

He swims away, free and clear.

A little over thirty minutes later, a little less than four kilometers swam, he pulls himself out of the water at a tourist boat dock, dripping wet and frozen. The good thing about it being early in the morning—barely daylight, even—coupled with the unseasonably cold weather is that pedestrians are few and limited. Less eyes on the weird, wet guy.

Barnes pats his pockets and feels the cash, ID, and credit cards there. That'll be good for later. For now, he can't risk being caught on a store's camera, nor can he risk people talking. And, in this part of Berlin, they  _would_  talk.

He walks north on Marschallbrücke and crosses the Spree via a sidewalk that boasts an upraised, rusting blue water pipe along its side. It's only one of the many ways that life has a habit of making fun of him.

The pipes end, replaced by graffitied walls, until the street narrows into a neighborhood of tall white buildings and small cars lining either side of the roadway. He passes a BB Bank and a Papa's Tapas, old residential blending with new commercial.

A little further down, Barnes cuts hard right and trots down a 24-hour APCOA parking garage ramp. He walks down a level and then zeroes in on a nice-looking row of vehicles.

There's nothing secretly stashed away here. There's nothing special he knows about it, except that it exists. He's only here to be a horrible person.

Barnes walks casually but purposefully, as if he belongs here, deftly avoiding cameras while glancing into car windows. He doesn't need money or transportation: he needs dry clothes, so he can reasonably walk into Berlin Central Station, buy a ticket, and get out of Berlin without drawing attention to himself.

The first row is a complete bust. He walks down another level and checks out another row of cars.

In the backseat of a small black VW, he finds a decent black wool jacket. Barnes opens the unlocked door and takes it, leaving enough Euros to count.

On the ramp to the next level, he sheds the baggy maintenance pants and shoulders on the jacket. Although his original t-shirt is still wet, the dry piece of clothing makes all the difference in the world, though it's a little tight in the shoulders.

He checks out another row of cars and finds a blue winter hat as well as a pair of black sunglasses. He takes both items and calls it quits. His pants are dark enough to not catch many eyes.

Barnes leaves the garage and walks the kilometer to the gleaming-window Berlin Central Station. Inside, he passes an inexplicable Paddington Bear pagoda and dozens of closed stores as he rushes to buy a ticket, too many cameras to dodge.

The only luck of the day is that the next train to anywhere pulls into the station with three minutes to spare.

Near the edge of the platform, he merges with a crowd of tired American tourists. Clad in blue jeans, baggy logo t-shirts, white Nike tennis shoes, and fanny packs, he pegs them as rural, which is  _absolutely fucking perfect_ : they don't know not to plow ahead onto the train, before the people getting off have a chance to disembark. It's the perfect kind of chaos, and he joins them in it.

As he walks down the aisle, he forces his left leg to move without a limp. When he comes to the threshold for the first-class cabins, he smoothly extends his hologrammed left hand, paper ticket out, with a " _grüß dich_ " offered to the ticket collector.

The whole point: if people come asking if anyone saw someone, no one will remember the dark haired, dark clothed thirty-something who had no distinguishing features to speak of. No one will think twice about him, and no one will ever pick him out of the crowd.

He has Stark to thank for making absolutely sure that happens. His old left-hand glove hadn't been noticeable, but there had been a handful of people who had stared. It only takes one loud mouth.

Ticket scanned, he makes his way to his cabin. Inside, he closes the door and its window curtain, then promptly lays down on the floor.

He holds the ticket above his face and squints at its tiny text.

He's on a train to Prague.

That's not even terrible. It's only a five-hour drive to Kraków from there.

"Thank fucking god."

The train jerks forward, then begins its long, smooth journey toward the Czech Republic. As its speed gains, Barnes' worry about a sudden HYDRA attack lessens.

Still on the floor, Barnes kicks his soggy shoes off, then removes his disgusting socks, and rips off the sweaty, polyester hat.

It doesn't feel like very long ago that he was damp, cold, hungry, and exhausted on a similar train. It might have only been something like – two days ago.  _Two_.

He sits up, presses his back against the seat, and uses the front of the cushion as a pillow for his neck. The relief it provides the aching, burning muscles is indescribable. He bends his right arm back and finds the complimentary thin, fleece blanket; unwrapped from the plastic, he throws it over his legs.

It's not great. It's not where he wants to be. It's not helping anyone, let alone finding the only people in this world who matter. It's also not HYDRA.

Torn between eating and sleeping, Barnes' eyes decide for him. He falls asleep on the floor, the tips of buildings and tops of trees blurring by, while the first rays of morning sun dull into winter's overcast sky.

He dreams of Steve sinking into the inky depths of the Potomac, of ripping tulips out of the water, of grabbing onto Steve's shoulder but both of them descending into the limitless cold, even as his fingers gouge desperate holes in Steve's –

Footsteps  _clomp_ ,  _clomp_  down the aisle, more slowly than a normal person would walk.

Barnes snaps his eyes open, hand moving toward his sidearm. All said, he thinks he's going to need to surgically extract it from his back, since it seems like it's melded straight to his fucking skin.

He stands up, every part of his body stiff and unhappy, especially when he bends over to grab his shoes.

 _Clomp, clomp_. A shadow stops outside his door, perceptible in the tiny gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.

No one knocks. It's not service.

Maybe he overreacts. Maybe not.

Shoes be damned, Barnes punches the cabin's window with his left hand. The safety glass caves outward; after another swift punch, it shoots out of its metal frame at 120 kp/h.

Wasting no time, he takes a good breath, ensures his sidearm is secure, and slides through the window frame, keeping his body as close to the train car as possible.

The wind whips his hair, billows under the wool jacket, and ripples the skin of his face. The jacket thing is annoying; he maneuvers his body so that the wind sucks it off of him, then pulls himself onto the top of the train.

Ahead, he can see the village of Muldenstein. In a few seconds, the tracks will cross the Mulde River; it's only about a twenty-foot drop off the elevated train tracks and into the frozen river.

Of everything, it's one of his most vivid, gnawing memories, but fear has no place here.

Inside the cabin, he hears the door lurch open, a footstep, a heavy breath, and an unfamiliar male voice lament, "You've got to be kidding me."

Definitely  _not_  overreacting.

With the Mulde in sight, he silently rolls off the train's roof.

He falls.

The train rattles away along its icy tracks.

The roof of his mouth tingles. His chest tightens. The memory of his left arm explodes, and nerve endings decades gone find a way to twist and tear at long-dormant pain receptors.

Every day of training—of muscle memory, of fabricated instincts, of focus—drains away. He forgets to open his eyes, forgets to straighten his body, forgets to pin his arms to his side, forgets to time his breath intake to allot for maximum underwater readiness.

He hits the river back-first and crashes through a layer of ice. The stress fractures that ripple across the river's frozen crest sound like cables snapping, like it had decades before. He sinks and sinks, colder and colder, darker and darker, like he had decades before.

Maybe today is decades that haven't really passed. Maybe he's drowning, and this has all, all of it, been something terrible but false.

 _HYDRA_ , his brain tries to say.  _HYDRA is here_.

_Swim._

_Focus._

_Go._

His body bumps into the rocky bottom of the river. Instinctually, he somersaults onto his stomach, grabs one of the rocks, and holds position.

Eyes closed, it's almost peaceful down here, despite his panic-wracked body begging for air. It's almost as if the world above has stopped existing. It's bone-chilling cold, darkest of dark, but quiet.

It's the first place they'll look for him, too.

 _Swim. Go_.

Right.

Barnes opens his eyes to a pair of glowing, red eyes  _centimeters_  away.

He sucks in a breath, forgetting – how in the  _fuck_  –  _son of a bitch_  –

Icy water slithers into his chest. It burns.

A thick, larger-than-life hand reaches for him, and Barnes doesn't think. He reacts with a left-hook aimed at the glowing eyes, and he feels it connect by way of the splintering pain that rebounds through the left side of his chest.

The hand goes away, and Barnes kicks upward, his body forcing out coughs and hemorrhaging oxygen.

Even though HYDRA's right on top of him, geared with some  _more_  horrible new technology, his biggest thought is that he's going to drown twice in two days. They'd love that; it'd make it real easy for them.

He kicks and kicks, having no plan beyond breaking the surface, having no thought beyond _going to drown_ , until that huge hand wraps around his left wrist and pins his arm behind his back.

_Stronger._

Barnes punches with his right hand, connects with solid metal, and might've broken bone to accomplish nothing.

White, rushing noise fills his ears. His vision grays. He can't breathe, and HYDRA has him.

He can't breathe, and HYDRA –

With his injured right hand, Barnes draws his sidearm, flicks the safety off, and pushes the barrel against his chest. Finger on the trigger, he's a split second too slow: another huge, metal hand knocks his off-trajectory, the fired bullet cutting harmlessly through the water instead of through his heart.

The hand painfully grips and twists his right wrist, either to stop another attempt or to make him drop the gun, maybe both. Either way: unlikely. He's broken that wrist  _himself_  at least two times before, and the only way he's losing the sidearm is if this fucker rips his hand off.

They'd fucking like that, wouldn't they.

His right hand doesn't get ripped off. His right arm, though, sidearm and all, is forcibly twisted behind his back, next to his left arm.

That's a mistake.

Sunlight streams through the water. The surface is close.

Using both of his arms, Barnes presses his body against the person holding him—it feels like  _all metal_ —and flips himself over the helmeted head. Although a risk, the surprise pays off: the person releases his arms, and Barnes launches off the solid body with both of his feet.

One second, two seconds, three seconds – he holsters his sidearm, breaks through the surface, and launches into a freestyle stroke. The river bank is only ten meters to the south, before it gives way into a thick forest. That's the goal.

He doesn't hear the  _whipping_  of helicopter blades or the  _hum_  of Quinjet engines. He doesn't hear voices, or  _clacks_  of weapons, or  _rustles_  of clothing. He hears his own ragged, vapid breaths, the splashing of water, and the din of traffic a half a klick away.

When his knees hit silt, he trudges to the muddy bank, his bare feet sinking into the half-frozen ground. Seconds pull away, sluggish and slow, like him. He focuses on the tree line, one step at a time, and holds back a fit of coughs his body compulsively tries to spit out.

His hand aches. His thigh and neck burn. His right arm is numb. His lungs feel stripped raw. He wants to collapse and sleep for days.

More than anything, he wants Natasha or Sam. He needs a friend to say  _we've got this_ ,  _you're not alone_.

Barnes steps into the forest, looks ahead about ten meters, and knows he's going to die.

It's a cloudy morning: still overcast, still dimly dark, without much sunlight. He doesn't need that sunlight to see the shadowed, dominating metal-suited figure with glowing red eyes, standing directly in front of him.

"That's the last time I'm pulling you out of a river this week."

Barnes hears the male voice but barely listens.

With his left hand, he draws his sidearm again. He puts his finger on the trigger and lets his arm hang at his side.

One of them is going to die here. It won't be the guy wearing a metal suit.

Huge, metal hands extend out. "C'mon, don't do that. Put that away."

Still no helicopters or jets, still no other ground team. Still –

"Okay. Look. I'm going to trust you to not use that. Okay?"

Before Barnes can choose to not say anything, the armor peels away, plate by plate, piece by piece, until it has impossibly folded into a black-and-silver bracelet around the man's right wrist.

Without the helmet, the person looks vaguely familiar in a way that Barnes can't place. Male, tall, lanky thin, older than mid-40's. He knows the person but doesn't know  _how_  he does.

"I'm not HYDRA, Barnes. I'm U.S. military. I'm on your side," the man says, sickeningly patient. "Put the weapon down."

Barnes can't get a read on this guy or on this situation. What he knows is that every situation for the past however many days has come equipped with trap doors, and he's sick and fucking tired of falling through them.

Something important snaps inside of him. It might be the wall that he's carefully built for four years. It's the one that separates the person he wants to be from the person he's been. With that wall gone, Barnes looks to his instincts for instructions, but they're silent.

Barnes aims his sidearm at the man's chest. It's not for show. He  _will_.

The man's hands instantly raise up, fear clear in his body language. "Really? That's where you're gonna go with this?"

Barnes lets his anger show. "I don't know you."

"Yes, you—"

"Fucking prove it."

Barnes doesn't know if he cares to hear an answer. If this guy is HYDRA, if they know he's here, he can't, he  _can't_  today. He's far, far better off killing this guy and getting the hell out of here.

The guy huffs out a sigh and drops his hands about a half a foot. "You know, you're worse than Tony. It'd be great if you'd let me talk."

"Tony" is the clue that puts the puzzle together. He  _does_  know this person.

James Rhodes. War Machine. Stark's Steve. Barnes knows from the SHIELD data dump and a couple of scant news clips over the years.

After Somehow-Not-Steve and HYDRA-Eicher, he needs proof. The gun stays where it is, but he takes his finger off the trigger.

"My name is Colonel James Rhodes. They all call me Rhodey. I'm sorry I jumped yo—"

Barnes elevates his aim from Rhodes' chest to his head, to prove a point and maybe just to fuck with the guy. He still takes nothing from the fear he sees. "Do better."

Rhodes perceptibly struggles, but he doesn't beg, make ultimatums, or try for excuses. A part of Barnes says  _this is enough_ , but that's the stupid part, the Bucky part, and it's not times like these that he cares much about that voice.

Finally, Rhodes says, "You like the New England Patriots because Sam hates them."

Two weeks at Stark Tower had mostly included Monday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, and all-day Sunday football with Sam. Barnes doesn't give a fuck about football, unless it involves pissing Sam off.

HYDRA's never touched that part of him.

Barnes lowers the sidearm, pushes the safety, and lets his knees buckle. His ass lands on a thick log, and he takes a quick moment to rest his eyes. He yearns to stuff a pillow under his neck and stretch his shoulder out.

A couple of other things catch up to him again: his right hand is on fire, his lungs feel like they've been scraped with coarse sandpaper, and the back of his neck is excruciating.

"What, that easy? After all that?"

"I'm sorry," Barnes offers. To his own ears, his voice sounds as exhausted and broken as his body feels.

Rhodes' expression schools, until there's nothing left to read except "career military." "The safe house had cameras. We saw everything. I was there in under five minutes."

A better HYDRA— _his_ HYDRA—would have killed the feed and made sure  _nothing_  was on camera. Fucking  _ever_. So, either this HYDRA is still a bit lacking, or today had been about sending SHIELD a message. He'd bet on the latter.

"I held them off of you at the river. I was  _there_."

That explains the easy swim. He might owe this guy his life.

Barnes closes his eyes again. After a few seconds, the relief of  _rest_  slips over him like a nice, cool blanket. He might fall asleep right here, sitting up.

He hears Rhodes sigh, then crunch across the forest floor. Barnes feels him sit down on his left.

"Where were you going?"

Barnes ignores that question for now. "You know Eicher's dead, right?"

Tension stresses Rhodes' body before he articulates a single word. "Berlin police found her body in one of the hospital's maintenance rooms. Bullet in the head. We sent a HYDRA operative right to you."

As murders tend to go, at least not a horrible one, but now another person killed for him.

"No kidding," Barnes replies, purposefully emotionless. "And Kraków."

"Via Prague?  _You_  do better."

Barnes sighs, heavy and hard, because he's  _tired_  and this is  _obvious_. "I took the first fucking train. Cameras."

His throat is raw, enough so that he's finished with talking for the day. He doesn't know what Rhodes' mission or plan is, and he doesn't know that he particularly cares. For now, he'd be happy being left alone to grab a few hours—just a few hours—of rest, before taking a crack at Kraków.

_Ha._

Barnes hears Rhodes stand up. That means he's leaving. Good.

"Alright then. There's a safe house in Leipzig."

Barnes opens his eyes, not sure why he's surprised. Without argument, he takes Rhodes' outstretched hand, almost glad to have someone say  _we've got this_  and  _you're not_ –

"You smell like a fish."

Nevermind.

***

It's a fast, twenty-minute flight to Leipzig. No big deal.

"JARVIS, sound." That command means Barnes won't be able to hear what Rhodes says next. "Vitals?"

In the space of about fifteen minutes, Rhodes' internal image of Barnes has shifted from "unconquerable and threatening" to "vulnerable and terrified." The only plan moving forward is to get the team back on-grid – and then Barnes to New York, before he finally manages to kill himself for real.

Barnes' vitals pop up in Rhodes' HUD. Everything is high for a regular human but probably fairly normal for Barnes.

"New injuries?"

"Fractured third and fourth right metacarpal."

A boxer's fracture, from trying to punch through the suit. "He didn't shoot himself?"

"No new gunshot wounds detected."

That's one bit of good news, at least. "Sound, JARVIS. Barnes."

No answer.

Rhodes tries again. "Hey. Barnes."

Again, no answer.

"I believe he is sleeping, Colonel," JARVIS says.

"How in the fuck."

Overall, Rhodes feels like he should have a particularly painful form of whiplash. In less than an hour, their entire relationship has spanned from jumping off of a train, to a suicide attempt, to aiming a handgun to kill, to this weird level of absolute trust.

Nobody had warned him about this. All he'd gotten from Natasha is "he's coming around"; from Sam, "yeah, he's cool."

What had been  _cool_  about this? Why hadn't they said, "He's really fucking touchy, so go in by backing off"?

The rest of the flight is quick and boring, as standard as standard comes. Rhodes sets down at the edge of a forest, near a meadow off the expressway in northern Leipzig.

He's pleasantly surprised when Barnes lands on his feet, instead of on his back as Rhodes had planned. The descent probably woke him.

Rhodes de-suits and breathes in cool air. Nothing about their surroundings sets off any of the proverbial alarm bells. A mall-like strip of buildings takes up a large swath of developed area across the expressway; to their south, a quaint, well-kept neighborhood of red-roofed houses reposed in the morning quietude.

The light scrabbling of small rodents darting across crunchy foliage and the hooting of sleepy owls blend with the village ambiance: the tires of cars  _whooshing_  across asphalt, the  _hum_ of streetlights, and the  _creak-creak-creaking_  of shaky furnaces.

"Where is it?" Barnes asks. By the sounds of it, he's in the middle of field stripping and tossing his sidearm.

Rhodes jerks his head toward the east. "About a half mile. Can you make it?"

Rhodes doesn't see Barnes' dirty look so much as he feels it.

"I'm used to Tony, okay?" Rhodes doesn't wait to see if that mollified the guy. "C'mon."

Shoulder-to-shoulder, they walk through the frosted-grass meadow and onto a narrow, paved street lined by small houses. Significantly underdressed for the weather, Rhodes wraps his arms around his chest.

He glances over at Barnes, whose hair is sticking up in icy chunks. "It's fucking cold," Rhodes comments.

Barnes blows out a long, thick puff of icy breath. Rhodes takes it as agreement.

Fifteen minutes later, they come upon a small, one-story white house with a sharply-angled red roof. Barnes trailing behind, Rhodes trots up a short set of three steps and grips the front door's stainless steel handle.

Hill had promised him two things: the handle would have a built-in fingerprint reader, and SHIELD would remotely activate the house's electricity.

It's not that he doubts her. Things tend to go wrong, these days.

Rhodes turns the handle and pushes open the door. He steps inside, swipes his hand across the right-hand wall, and flips the light switch. After a half-second delay, a bright ceiling light illuminates a short hallway that opens to a small living room.

As far as safe houses go, it's one of the better he's seen. The walls are painted-white plaster – yellowed and blank, but smooth and solid. The floors are parquet, blonde wood. It smells old – dusty, unused, vacant – but not bad.

The front door  _clicks_  shut. Rhodes turns and sees a person about two seconds from dropping but way too stubborn to admit it. Also, in the bright light, Rhodes finally notices that he's not wearing shoes.

"Well," Rhodes says, "this is i—"

One of the bulbs  _pops!_  and goes dark.

Neither of them startle. Barnes keeps a look of someone who's a million miles away. It's almost funny, not that Rhodes lets on.

Instead, Rhodes walks into the living space and switches on another set of lights. A faded velvet green sofa sits in the middle of the room. It's flanked by two greenish-brown, leather club chairs. Heavy, dust-covered, mustard yellow drapes dwarf a set of long rectangular windows. Overall, the entire room has a nasty case of Saturday Night Fever.

Through an arched doorway, a shoebox kitchen is stuffed with cases of water and MREs. A closed, brown particle wood door near the corner of the living room probably leads to a bathroom; Rhodes hopes to God it works, but he doubts it does. Hill hadn't said anything about running water.

Rhodes nods to himself: they can make this work. "Let me see your—"

_Click!_

Rhodes turns toward the empty hallway. He's pretty sure Barnes just sequestered himself in the only bedroom, without a "see ya" or a "thank you" or a "fuck you" between them.

Or so Rhodes thinks, until two minutes later, when Barnes honest to God yells, his voice going from crackly to high pitched and then back to crackly, "There's no fucking  _water_?!"

Rhodes bites back a laugh and then can only watch, speechless, as Barnes tears out of the bedroom and straight through the front door. He throws behind a "I'm finding a fucking hotel."

Seriously. Why had no one warned him?

Rhodes flips off the lights and chases after Barnes. He'd seen a hotel sign on the flight in, and, if they're gonna do this, well. He might as well make it easy.

***

At the hotel's check-in desk, a fake passport and SHIELD-issued credit card on the counter, Barnes doesn't let it drop. "Seriously, no fucking water?"

Rhodes nods placatingly and searches on Google Images for something. When he finds it, he asks, "Do you know what Super Mario is?"

Barnes shakes his head "no."

Even better.

Rhodes tilts the phone Barnes' way, showing him a .GIF of Mario going down several different green pipes. "Surveillance footage of you today. It's real. Don't mind the mustache."

Barnes glowers at Rhodes, then turns to the clerk. "Is it too late to get separate rooms?"

Caught off guard, open mouthed and reluctant to say "yes," the clerk looks to Rhodes, then to Barnes, and then back to Rhodes. "I am sorry; only one room is…"

"He's kidding."

"No, I'm not."

In the room, before Barnes moves to devour the shower, Rhodes tosses him the hotel's breakfast restaurant menu and tells him to write down what he wants.

"I'll order it."

Barnes writes down half the menu. "Thanks."

Barnes and his still-damp clothes disappear into the bathroom, and Rhodes decides to do the guy a favor. Some of the stores he'd seen coming in might be open.

On his way to one of them, he puts in a to-go order for both at them at the hotel's restaurant.

It's a short, five-minute walk from the hotel to the shopping center. Rhodes goes into the first familiar clothing store he sees—a TK Maxx, of all places—and spends about forty minutes estimating Barnes' size and picking up a single set of basics in blacks and grays, including shoes.

On his way to the registers, he passes the hair section and recalls how much shit Sam talked about Barnes' love for hair products. He grabs a bottle of gel.

Thing is: he'd do the same for anyone. The other thing is: compared to some of the shit he's done for Tony, before and after Iron Man, this is one of the easiest days of his life.

Speaking of. Rhodes checks his watch. It's not even 1000 yet. Tony and Sam's check-in isn't until 1300. By any grace of God, that check-in will come on time and include only good news. They need good news today.

Rhodes walks back to the hotel, picks up the food in four cardboard to-go boxes, and heads up to their room.

The bathroom door is still shut, and the water is surprisingly still running. Military lifers don't usually hoard showers.

Rhodes raps on the door. "You alive?"

"Think so."

"I've got the food here."

The water shuts off. Rhodes cracks the door open and slides the fabric bag of clothes and hair gel through.

"Wha—" Rustling. "Thank you."

For the first time all morning, Barnes sounds like he means something. A hot shower, clean clothes, and the promise of warm food can make a big difference.

Barnes comes out in jeans, gray socks, a black v-neck, and a gray wool-fleece zip-up; the clothes mostly fit and are damn sight better than the frazzled clothes he's been wearing. His hair has been gelled enough to give it shape. He looks appreciably healthier and, most importantly, low-key and calm.

Barnes looks Rhodes straight, eye contact established. "Thank you. Really."

Again with sounding like he means it.

Rhodes gestures toward Barnes' three boxes of food and takes his own from the stack. "Eat and get some sleep. Check-in's at 1300."

He doesn't have to make the offer twice.

With the TV set to a German talk show, Rhodes sits on his bed, and Barnes sits on the floor with a pillow between his neck and the foot of his bed, both of them eating in relative, comfortable silence.

"You have to admit," Barnes comments, "this is way better than the safe house."

Rhodes can't honestly argue that. "Expensive."

"That's what Sharon says."

Barnes can't see Rhodes' smirk, a quick warning before Rhodes happily goes there. "Rumor has it that she was mean to you."

Barnes' soft, muttered "god damn it" comes through loud and clear.

***

1300 comes and goes.

Rhodes paces back and forth across the room, from the brown-draped window, past the black faux leather club chairs, then past the two twin beds, until he finally settles in a gray suede chair, eyes staring blankly into the television screen.

Barnes is passed out on top of the covers, dead to the world as far as Rhodes can tell. He thinks Barnes is going to be out like that for a long while.

At 1400, Hill calls. Rhodes answers it in the bathroom, door closed. Barnes' old clothes are crumpled in the corner, a white towel thrown on top of them.

"Iron Man and Falcon aren't responding. Still no word from Black Widow's team. Tell me you have Barnes."

"Affirmative. He's here and safe."

"Stark stashed a Quinjet in Hangar 4 at Leipzig. I already filed a flight plan for you – tomorrow at 05 was the earliest aviation authority would allow. Return to base and bring Barnes."

The call ends quickly. Rhodes pockets his phone, leaves the bathroom, and takes a seat on his bed. On his right, Barnes is still sound asleep.

Rhodes figures he'd better enjoy the peace while it lasts. From everything he's heard over the years, and from everything he's seen over the past few hours, it's a guarantee that Barnes is going to flip.

The only luck of the day is that Barnes  _sleeps_  and sleeps  _hard_ , until 0400 the next morning, when Rhodes nudges him awake and tells him the orders.

Barnes doesn't quite flip – at least, not with the reckless anger that Rhodes had expected.

"They don't have that time," Barnes argues, the intensity of the statement belied by the false calm of his voice. "We go today."

"Oh, no. You're in  _no shape_ ," Rhodes argues back. "We go to New York and figure it out from there. Orders."

Barnes laughs something wretched and turns toward the door. "I don't give a fuck about orders."

Rhodes catches Barnes' upper right arm and pulls him back. Barnes turns, expression inscrutable; his eyes sharply move from his arm to Rhodes' face. Briefly, Rhodes thinks of the story from a couple years ago – the one about Steve trying the same thing and getting a knife in the face for it. He drops Barnes' arm.

"That's not how it works, and you know it. You know it." Rhodes intends to seal the deal. "You're SHIELD now, Agent. We go to New York."

For all that Barnes is chronologically over 100 years old, he's still every bit an impulsive, exhausting 28-year-old. "Then fire me."

Barnes opens the door and limps into the hall, a tad reminiscent of an insect uselessly throwing itself at a bright light. The guy doesn't know when to stop, and Rhodes has every confidence that he  _won't_. He'll drag himself to Poland and get himself killed or worse.

Rhodes throws the proverbial hail Mary. "They're the only people you have. You think I don't get that?"

Barnes spins back around, left hand slamming the door open, that expected fervor in his eyes. " _I_ sent them there. I'm not running away to Stark Tower."

It's probably not a good time to mention headquarters isn't Stark Tower anymore. Or that Barnes can barely walk, let alone run. Too pedantic, too Tony.

"What's your plan?" Rhodes spreads his hands, offering a solution. "Tell me a plan."

Hesitantly, with suspicion written all over his face, Barnes steps back inside and lets the door close behind him.

"I lost four days out there, and it felt like minutes. I'm not confident there's a problem yet." An interesting take on the situation. "We take the jet to Dabrowa Valley. We boost satcomm instruments to establish contact, while monitoring HYDRA's frequencies."

"Recon and support," Rhodes simplifies. "That's it?"

"Probably."

At least he's almost honest.

"I'll make a phone call. Hold tight."

By the sounds of it, Hill is barely happy with the request, let alone the plan itself. "We've already lost contact with  _five_  of the team. You're the only two left."

"Maria, we're going to have go at some point," Rhodes levels. "All we're proposing is recon."

He hears her sigh, loud and heavy, and imagines that she's rubbing her eyes out of frustration. "Is he mobile?"

Rhodes glances at Barnes, who's sprawled back-flat on the bed. He's conscious, at least. "Yeah, he's mobile."

"Enough to survive and/or escape enemy engagement?" Hill's tone tells him that she's not buying what he's selling.

Barnes lifts his head up and gives the phone a shitty look.

Rhodes ignores the look and provides his assessment, only about half of it bullshit. The attempted suicide gnaws in the back of his mind. "He was okay on his own yesterday. He's decent."

"I'm great," Barnes corrects.

"Six hours, Colonel, and then you get yourself and Barnes to New York."

"Understood." The call ends. "Happy?"

Barnes rolls off the bed and drops less than smoothly onto his feet. He doesn't even realize he's wrecked, Rhodes thinks.

"Where are you going?" Rhodes asks, almost afraid of the answer.

"There's a breakfast buffet downstairs. Starts at 05. Coming?"

Seriously, no one warned him.

***

At 0634, Barnes sets Quinjet Two down in a miniscule clearing deep inside the forested, hilly terrain of Dabrowa Valley. On its skids, the jet tilts a few degrees to its port. The landing system flashes green – stable enough to stay. It's a good landing.

He doesn't miss that Rhodes sets his watch for 1230. Just in case he had, Rhodes reminds, "Six hours, and then we're out."

"Got it."

Barnes powers down the jet to critical systems only, a precautionary measure to minimize the risk of being detected by HYDRA. He unstraps from his seat, walks around Rhodes to the middle of the jet, and pulls the communication relay module from the bulkhead.

He hears Rhodes page for Stark and then for Natasha – once, twice, three times each. Then Steve, then Sam, then Sharon.

Boosting the power is a simple matter of rearranging wires, dropping the RF to ultra-low, and expanding the propagation of their signal beyond line-of-sight. He goes back to the cockpit, sits down, and oversamples the comm channels. It'll pick up everything and let him sort through frequencies of interest.

In the seat next to him, Rhodes comments, "You know your way around these jets."

"Yep." Barnes is unwilling to explain anything about how he does.

He pops in a Bluetooth earbud and starts sifting through the RFs. The persistent restlessness that's been chewing at him since yesterday dissipates.

"JARVIS, what is Tony's location?"

"I am unable to complete scans within the subterranean complex. The complex is shielded with an unknown composite. Additionally, I do not detect Mr. Stark within a 100-mile vicinity of this area. However, a system failure involving primary, secondary, and tertiary servers and mainframes occurred at 0716 on 3 January."

Even Barnes thinks that's weird – all of it. Between the suit and Stark's phone, there should be something traceable, especially by JARVIS. He doesn't know what the system failure thing means, but – what he's picked up on over the last year is that Stark's tech is pretty infallible.

He glances at Rhodes and sees a concerned friend.

Barnes offers, "I made it out of here on my own. There's five of them."

Life can go sideways in an instant, but he believes in Natasha like no one else. She'll get it done.

"And then they threw a car at you. Remember?"

Barnes shakes his head as he props his right foot against the console. "No."

Only about a day in, and Rhodes is already rolling his eyes.

"JARVIS, full spectrum analysis for radiation and any form of abnormal energy. Should've brought Banner."

Barnes tunes out Rhodes and focuses on the RF channels.

A lot of inconsequential chatter comes out of Kraków, including ZS RP communications. He listens long enough to rule out HYDRA, then filters right past them, no interest at all in Polish military operations.

A few choppy amateur hobbyists break through, their voices static-filled. Barnes listens to ensure they're truly civilian; once convinced, he flips past them, as well.

Standard Slovak Land Forces and Slovak Air Force transmissions come through loud and clear. He remembers something similar to this sometime in the late 80's, during the Autumn of Nations. The jet had been older, the communications equipment less sophisticated, and the mission far less altruistic.

His face burns with the memory. The mission's failure to accomplish HYDRA's long-term goals is a bare comfort. Beyond the death count, and the limitless impact on the world, he'd betrayed his family – and his mom, who, up until the day he deployed, hunted through New York's newspapers for news about the Antonescu regime. Her family had still been there, pulled from brutal fascism to a brutal Communism he'd worked to safeguard.

SHIELD is a way to be better.

"What's wrong?"

Barnes shakes his head. "Nothing."

"You sure?"

He's not annoyed. Rhodes is too decent a person. "Yeah."

All of a sudden, Russian fills his ear.

Barnes drops his right leg, presses his left hand against his left ear, and gets serious. He closes his eyes and listens.

It sounds like a couple of sentries calling in checkpoints. Makes sense: they're on a super ultra-low frequency, likely using groundwave communication, with multiple installations across an impressive expanse of southern Poland's mountains.

Minutes of boring, routine chatter chip away at his initial excitement. The biggest takeaway is that he might've gotten real fucking lucky a few days ago – or they've exponentially tightened their security around here.

"It's HYDRA radio chatter," Barnes tells Rhodes. "Standard. Doesn't sound like they know we're here."

He glimpses his watch—under an hour in—and keeps listening. If HYDRA has any of the team, he'll hear about it, no question.

One of the guards has a cold and coughs, thick and coarse, into the radio, in the middle of checking in. It's loud and painful; even Barnes flinches, hand uselessly guarding his ear.

"Fuck your mother, Alekhin! Not in the god damn radio!"

Only in Russian.

"Yeah, yeah, sorry," Alekhin says.

"Gamma radiation burst detected," JARVIS announces. "It is partially consistent with known properties of the Tesseract. A similar signal was detected at 0715 on 3 January."

A holographic map expands across the jet's windshield. It shows their location in green and the location of the radiation burst in orange, five kilometers southwest – inside the Tatra Mountains, fifty-five klicks south of Kraków.

Barnes studies it, recognizing the area. "JARVIS, zoom out."

After JARVIS complies, Barnes taps three new waypoints on it: Kozerska, the subterranean structure, and the base under Lake Kręta.

The gamma burst came from the subterranean structure. Location Y. Where all of them had gone and disappeared.

He can't say his stomach doesn't drop, or that chills don't run up through his neck, or that his palm doesn't break out with sweat. The last time he'd gone there, he hadn't been afraid of anything. His brain hadn't caught up to being human yet.

"What's that?" Rhodes asks.

"The subterranean base I found in February 2015. They were doing human experimentation there." Barnes points at different locations on the map, narrating for Rhodes as he goes. "The bottom subfloor leads to an underground tunnel system and unused railway. Right around here, a tunnel goes to Kozerska here." He points at the third waypoint. "This is a base I found a couple days ago. No idea what's there, but it's active."

"You might get mad."

Dubious, Barnes regards Rhodes. He leans further back into the seat. "Yeah?"

"SHIELD didn't have the resources to shut it down back then. It's been on the list since you found it."

Almost three years.

He's not mad about that. Sam had told him in Brazil: SHIELD's scraping by, there but for the grace of Tony Stark. At the beginning of 2015, it probably hadn't been any better.

Automatically, Barnes replies, "Not a big deal." Except, at this point,  _it kind of is_. "You know what I mean."

"Oh, but no water for a shower, and the world's ending?"

"Priorities."

Rhodes laughs, before asking JARVIS to pull active satellite imagery of the subterranean base.

After a few seconds, the holographic map transitions to a sharp, high definition image of a grassy meadow encased by a wall of conifers. If Barnes squints, he can make out a new steel doorway carved into a grassy hill. Otherwise, it looks exactly as it had in 2015.

"I really never wanted to go back there."

Rhodes catches his eyes, all the smiles and laughs gone. "You're not.  _We're_ not. Intel only."

"Got it."

Truth be told, the walk across the Leipzig tarmac to reach Stark's hangar hadn't felt so good. The problem is that SHIELD has no one else to send here, and the thought of leaving them behind barely coalesces in his head. Does not compute.

The Russian chatter keeps up in his ear. He listens for another fifty or so minutes, bemused when they check in with each other  _again_ , in the same order, with the same people. At least they're consistent; that'll make it easier to find and kill them.

Alekhin, with his cold and his cough, does it again: another thick, coarse cough barked into the radio, right in the middle of his check-in. Once and again, it's loud and painful. Barnes flinches, more pissed off this time, teeth gritted.

"Fuck your mother, Alekhin! Not in the god damn radio!"

"Yeah, yeah, sorry."

"Another gamma radiation burst detected," JARVIS announces. "It remains partially consistent with known properties of the Tesseract. Analysis indicates its signature is identical to the first."

The map with Barnes' three waypoints pops up, an orange marker in the same place as last time. He stares at it, thoughts tumbling.

Walking through Berlin and ending up in Poland. The portal at the Spree. They can bend space, using whatever they have of the Tesseract.

The same comm chatter, book-ended by the same gamma burst. Losing four days. They're messing with time.

Barnes feels his face go slack even as his mouth opens. Dry, hot breath sputters from the back of his throat as he tries and fails to formulate words.

"All right, we have plenty of data for Banner," Rhodes says, tone clear:  _this is an order, not a discussion._ "We're wasting time we could be using in New York. Let's go."

"No" is the worst way to respond, but it's all that his brain plops out of his mouth.

"Barnes, orders are— What the hell are you doing?"

He's already pulled up the recording from the first loop. He scales it back to find the time stamp: 0841. The soldier coughs, gets reamed, and then the gamma burst emits from the base. He pulls up the recording from a few minutes ago and notes the timestamp: 0937.

Fifty-five minutes between.

"Wait, their comms are looped? They're playing us?"

Barnes shakes his head, damn near frantically. "No. I need to go out there."

"The hell you do."

Whatever. He doesn't care. "Fine,  _you_  go. JARVIS, can you pinpoint the location of any of these soldiers?"

"Certainly."

Impressively fast, the locations of  _all_ the soldiers appear as red dots on the holographic map. Errantly, Barnes is thankful he never went up against Stark's tech, back in the HYDRA days. Its accuracy and capabilities are a little intimidating.

Barnes looks to Rhodes. "Pick one. And watch. Fifty-five minutes."

Rhodes' face screws up into a blend of confusion, refusal, and apprehension. "You've been through a lot—"

"I think it's a time loop."

"—and you're insane."

"Still a time loop."

Rhodes doesn't laugh at what Barnes thought was a pretty clever retort. That's fine.

"I heard I'm dead," Barnes says, intending to use that as bait. "That's not weird."

Rhodes closes his eyes and hangs his head but makes no move toward his armor or the jet's door. "We're aborting. Banner can figure this out."

Not good enough.

"Fifty-five minutes. That's all I'm asking. Less than an hour. We'll still be on schedule."

With a long-suffering sigh, Rhodes surprisingly acquiesces. "You owe me."

Barnes shrugs. "Fine."

"It's only so I can prove you wrong. Or certifiably insane."

"Shouldn't be hard," Barnes replies, half-taunt, half-lament.

***

Before the dim orange sun begins to peek over the eastern horizon, and before the full moon behind them begins to set, Tony and Sam land two hundred meters from the entrance to the subterranean base. Surrounded by tall, dense, green conifers, no one has a chance of seeing them. And, if they do, Tony has weapons for that.

Likewise: Tony and Sam have no chance of seeing anyone from here. For miles, it's pine trees. Lots and lots of pine trees.

"Man, I really hate this place," Sam complains. "You have no idea what we're getting into."

That's true. With an ounce of luck, they can pinpoint and grab Romanoff's team without too much fuss and muss, then get the hell out of here. Maybe drop a few accidental bombs and then send an apologetic fruit basket to Polish authorities.

"JARVIS, do you have their location?" Tony asks.

JARVIS is quick to respond. "I am unable to complete scans within the subterranean complex. The complex is shielded with an unknown composite. Additionally, I do not detect Agents Romanoff and Carter or Captain Rogers within a 100-mile vicinity of this area."

Well.  _That_ settles  _that_ : they're inside HYDRA's funhouse.

"Great," Sam huffs as he rolls his shoulders. "Thirteen stories of anything."

They'll be completely blind inside. And completely cut-off from comm access, Tony suspects, given that shielding.

"Blackbird, Iron Man," Tony says, using Barnes' stupid codename to  _maybe_  confuse any HYDRA eavesdroppers.

No response.

Sam glances at Tony. Behind Tony's helmet, Sam can't see his tired eye roll.

"Blackbird, Iron Man. Yoo-hoo. Anyone home?"

Not a thing.

Either their comms have already been jammed,  _or_ Earth's Laziest Hero is asleep,  _or_ Eicher's got his ass pinned to her medical wall. Tony would bet his life's fortune on one of the latter two. Genuinely perfect.

"He had  _one job_ ," Tony clucks. "Remind me to fire him tomorrow."

Unfortunately, Sam doesn't have a helmet to hide  _his_  eye rolling. Should've kept his goggles on. "I'm just glad you called Eicher."

All things being said: like they'd  _ever_ figured they'd actually have him help.

"All righty. Let's get this done."

Sam's goggles come down, and, together, they fly to the base's hidden entrance –

\- and, when they get there, the dark sunrising eastern sky switches around, to a dark  _sunsetting_ western sky. Dawn turns to dusk in a second flat, the setting, bright full moon entirely gone, not yet risen.

"Gamma radiation burst detected," JARVIS announces. "It is partially consistent with known properties of the Tesseract."

Tony barely notices the waypoint load into his HUD: far, far below the earth, off to the west a little. The rotating 3-D hologram puts it at the eleventh or twelfth subfloor. Sam should be seeing the same thing in his upgraded eyewear.

Bing-fucking- _o_.

Sam sticks a practiced landing, nano-wings retracting into an amazing little nano-bracelet but that's so not the point right now, and gapes at the switch from sunrise to sunset. "We lost time, like B did."

A story that had damn near encouraged Tony to look up mental hospitals near the base—you know, keep Barnes close to Steve and hopefully everybody mostly happy.

"JARVIS," Tony says, "what's the current day and time?"

Should be a bit past 7:15 am on January 3, 2018. The New Year's off to a hell of a start.

"I am unable to determine the current day and time. Access to primary, secondary, and tertiary servers and mainframes has been lost, and I am unable to re-establish connection. I estimate I will lose connection to you in five minutes and thirty-two seconds."

Tony kicks away a burst of surprised panic, one that tells him  _that's impossible_. It can't be impossible if it's happening. Worse than whatever's happening to JARVIS: without JARVIS, Tony has no suit.

"JARVIS, download locally."

A little something he'd built into his suit after New York in 2012.

"Downloading locally."

That solves that, but: nearly losing JARVIS means they've experienced a complete disconnect from  _multiple_ satellites and ground stations.  _They've_  lost connection to the rest of the world.

Losing that connection explains why Romanoff, Carter, and Steve haven't used JARVIS to communicate, send a distress call, order pizza – anything.

Sunrise turning to sunset in a second flat. The moon disappearing. Losing connection to the world.

Tony thinks that mental hospital's going to need to make room for him.

"It's a temporal causality distortion," Tony announces, about one second afterhe comes to the conclusion. "JARVIS—fuck. Nevermind. You can't do it."

Sam draws in a breath, jaw slack. "A fucking  _what_?  _What_?"

Skipping ahead a day or two or four wouldn't compromise JARVIS.  _Being stuck_ in a different time than the rest of the world  _would_.

"I think," Tony amends.

Sam shakes his head, even as his goggle-covered eyes dart around the landscape, searching for threats. "That's crazy."

"Like you even know what it is," Tony snaps, more distracted-annoyed than angry-annoyed. "What does your degree in Social Work think again?"

"That you're an asshole."

Tony stops, turns to Sam, blinks. Sam can't see that. "I'm blinking at you," Tony informs.

Less than intimidated, Sam stares back, eyes still obscured behind his goggles. "That's nice."

"Looks like I'm firing two people tomorrow. Oh, goodie." Tony thinks for a second. "Whenever tomorrow is. Lucky you."

All banter aside, they have two options: try to get out of here, leave Romanoff, et al. behind, and regroup with Banner  _or_ power ahead and try to end this now.

Sam answers that unasked strategy question. "The halls are too narrow to fly through. Even for me."

That's good information to have, though Tony doesn't have Sam's wing-span problem. He can fly.

"We'll see about that," Tony counters. "Try to keep up. Floor Eleven."

He knows he's being an ass. But, if he's right about what they've stumbled into—either a big HYDRA mistake or a big HYDRA trap—their clock is ticking them down into a relatively shitty eventuality.

Weapons locked and loaded, Tony fires his repulsors and blasts through the doorway, a "you've gotta be kidding me" echoing behind him from Sam.

***

Fifty-six minutes later, Rhodes flies back to the jet, sheds his suit, and eats his words. "It's a time loop. I'm calling Banner."

The cam feed that Rhodes shows the person named Bruce Banner is a single step removed from insanity.

From Rhodes' vantage point, the morning daylight cut sharply into dusk, the bright orange sun setting in the distance. The sentry station a couple hundred meters away was staffed by only two soldiers, one who stayed relatively put, and another who trudged a 100-meter path, back and forth, over and over again. The sun dipped lower, past the horizon, dusk turning into night.

Until the video's timestamp hit fifty-five minutes, and the video's image skipped. The trudging soldier vanished, reappearing 150 meters east. Night turned to dusk, the bright orange sun setting in the distance.

"This is real?" Banner asks. His face is smashed into a tiny rectangle on the top left-hand corner of the holographic screen; as such, it's hard to read his expression. "I mean, not a glitch in the recording software?"

"Saw it with my own two eyes," Rhodes responds. "It happens every fifty-five minutes and coincides with an increase in gamma radiation from Location Y."

Of course, Location Y is the subterranean base. On the holographic screen, it lights up with an orange waypoint.

"HYDRA had the Tesseract for as long as SHIELD did." Banner says it casually, but Barnes notices Rhodes tense. Still a sore point. "Looks like they managed to borrow part of it before 2012. I don't know that would explain a time loop, though."

Curtly, Rhodes asks, "What are they doing with it?"

"I don't know any more than they apparently do.  _That_ can't be on purpose." Banner sighs and tilts his head back and forth. "Remember Selvig? He was doing research on this stuff, before Loki happened. He thought there were space-time applications, but – not  _this_."

Barnes doesn't care about the guy named Selvig, or if HYDRA meant to do this or not. "But it's why the others haven't re-established contact. They're stuck."

"Fair bet," Banner says.

"We go in, shut it down, and get them out?" Rhodes suggests.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a  _bad_ idea," Banner says, something like concern on his face. "Look, if they're caught in this thing, then the minute you step into the loop radius, you will be too."

"Loop radius?" Rhodes asks.

"Yeah, you can see it on your video, where day cut into night. JARVIS, mark where those soldiers were. Are. Whatever." After JARVIS does that, Banner zooms in on the map and plots a red circle, Location Y as the epicenter and the location of Rhodes' soldiers as the outer boundary. "There it is, more or less. Go past that line, and you'll be looped in. Don't do that."

Barnes follows the line of thinking. "We'll never know the difference."

"Exactly. Our people probably  _don't_."

His chest constricts as he imagines the implications. Fuck doing the same thing over again – it's the memory part that rattles him. If he digs deep enough, he can already tell Rhodes what it's like to have the same thing happen over and over and not know.

Hands clasped behind his head, Rhodes spins in a full circle, sighing as he goes. "Okay. Can you get out once you're in?"

Banner makes an ambivalent face, the biggest "yeah, maybe" Barnes has ever seen. "I can't tell you that, not based on this telemetry."

Barnes regards Rhodes. "You think you can fly out just before fifty-five and then fly back in after? Is that your thinking?"

"I don't know." Rhodes sighs again. "Bruce – what do you think?"

"I think I'm glad I'm not in your shoes. Or big metal boots."

Rhodes sours, not a smile in sight at Banner's bad joke. It's the first time yet that Rhodes hasn't seemed completely in control. No blame: Rhodes' plan won't work.

"I've been in this building. The ceilings are low, and the hallways are narrow. You won't be able to fly."

Arms tight across his chest, Rhodes takes a big, deep breath. "How do we turn it off, Bruce?"

Banner's expression doesn't portend great things. His hands raise up into an exaggerated shrug. "I'm four thousand miles away. I have no idea what they've built. Find an off switch."

"Really."

"Sorry."

Hill takes over the call. It's been a long while since Barnes has seen her. "I would tell you to come in," she says, then looks directly at Barnes, "but I doubt you would listen."

Since she's talking directly at him, Barnes has no problem saying, "Coming in would change nothing on our end and potentially everything on this end. We have a clear shot."

_Take it._

"Colonel?"

Surprisingly, Rhodes has a ready answer. "Agreed."

"So be it."

Long minutes after the call ends, Rhodes leans onto the cockpit's console, palms flat against it. "You stay. I'm going in."

Very expected.

"The advantage you bring is completely wasted inside that building." Barnes plows forward, heading off Rhodes' mounting interruption. "I'm built for this."

Rhodes stands up straight and turns. " _Built_."

"Yeah. This is what I do."

"With a broken neck and a busted leg."

Barnes doesn't stand up straighter, or lock his jaw, or react to that in any way. "They're the only people I have. If I wasn't good for it, I wouldn't do it. This is what I do."

Rhodes knows he's right – Barnes can see it in the set of his eyes, in the small decrease of tension in his shoulders, and the slowing of his heartrate. "What are you proposing?"

Done deal.

***

The tips of Sam's wings scrape gouges into the brightly lit, concrete walls. It's a dumb fucking idea to fly in here, but – here they are.

Tony's nonexistent plan of "attack" isn't going to work so well – but it reminds Sam of Steve, in the best way.

But also: attack  _what_?

So far, at least on floor one, there aren't people in here. In fact, the only two signs that HYDRA is actually here are the lights being on and the radiation signal JARVIS had picked up.

Ahead, Tony winds down the corridor, the heat from his repulsors pitting the walls. He blasts open the closed door to the stairwell and roars through, his suit scraping and sparking against the interior of the building.

Without one idea about what they're going to find on Subfloor Eleven, Sam follows.

It's exactly as Sam remembers it from 2015, only three short years ago. Thinking of that day—of finding a naked, starved, beaten, and mutilated dead body and then a laboratory steeped in the stench of old death—swells an unmistakable sense of nausea in his gut.

He can't afford that feeling today.

Steve, Natasha, and Sharon can't afford it, either.

Find them, get them, grab Barnes, go home, and never come back here:  _that's_ the plan. Sift through the nightmares later.

Sam shoots into the stairwell and retracts his wings. The upgraded set made with Stark-patented nano technology is, admittedly,  _amazing_ : the wings fully retract within 1.2 seconds, and they can fully extend in as little as 0.8 seconds.

So, while Tony bounces, scrapes, and sparks off the walls as he spirals around each flight of L-shaped stairs, Sam one-ups Tony's stupid ass: hops over the scratched-metal rail and drops himself down the long, deep gap created by each descending level of stairs.

He falls.

It's only  _a little_ scary: thirteen floors down, into drop dead darkness.

Pushing himself beyond his nerves and pounding, distracting fear, Sam concentrates on counting:  _one._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

Deploy.

Sam re-extends his wings and engages his thrusters, rising up as the soles of his boots whisper across the old concrete of the thirteenth floor. A little close for comfort.

His wingspan is  _way too wide_ for this narrow space, and it's not a problem when Sam grabs ahold of a handrail and kicks himself back onto the happy, solid ground of a stair tread.

He keeps his wings out but folds them back, behind him. Sometimes, in the right situation, they come in handy: to block bullets, to do some nice moves, to attack.

"No one's impressed," Tony gripes over their comm.

Despite it all, Sam smirks. "It's all right, Iron Man. We can't all be this cool. Waiting."

Waiting between subfloors Ten and Eleven, it looks like. One of the exact places he'd never, ever wanted to be again, in his entire, entire life.

Sam draws two automatic weapons, checks them for serviceability, and steels himself for an oncoming fight.

An oncoming fight that, apparently, Steve, and Natasha, and Sharon had lost. Doesn't exactly bode well.

It takes Tony more than a few seconds to  _clomp-clomp-clomp_  down the stairs, leaving mini-moon craters as he goes. Flying hadn't worked out so well for him, it seems.

"I'm a terrible houseguest, what can I say," Tony quips behind an expressionless, angry-looking mask. "Let's do this."

"What's the rush – got a hot date with Pepper?"

Tony looks at him – at least, Sam thinks he does. "As a matter of fact. Ever been to Henry's End? It's some place in Brooklyn – which, ugh, yeah. Pepper won't stop talking about it."

As a matter of fact. "Yeah, actually it's pretty good. Steve really liked it."

"Oh. We'll go somewhere else, then."

Of course.

With Tony's date night somewhat planned, they skulk down the half-flight of stairs – and Tony wastes no time at all blasting down the door marked "11."

A sea of bullets instantly  _plink-plink-plink-plink_  against Tony's suit.

Sam wraps his bulletproof wings around himself, tapping two wrist gauntlets together to activate his cool, still-new toy: a tiny arsenal of mini-missiles.

As Tony shoots forward into the room, those bullets  _plink-plink-plink_  against Sam's impenetrable wings, until, like a bag of popcorn left in the microwave a hot second too long, the barrage becomes more of a  _plink….plink_ …. _plink?_

Sam takes advantage of the lull and zooms up toward the tall ceiling, spiraling as he goes to avoid the last dregs of those bullets. He flips around and waits for the enemy tracking system in his goggles to register: four red-marked targets, with a square tracking peg locking onto each of them.

Green light go.

Sam fires four of his little missiles and doesn't wait around to see if the targets die by them. They will.

Six other black-clad, helmeted HYDRA soldiers are already limp and lifeless on the new, dark gray floor.

Like: who's still signing up to be part of this shit?

Tony drops to the ground, while Sam hovers, taking in an expansive room that must have been stolen from the set of a cool James Bond movie.

The first part of the room, where they'd entered, expands high, up to at least the tenth floor. Right above Sam's head, new light fixtures silently strew clear, dazzling fluorescent light across an  _expanse_ of laboratory space.

The walls are smooth, fresh concrete, not a crumble or a pit or a pockmark in sight.

The floors are as shiny, as smooth - and look like poured gray epoxy. Not old. Not 1930's. It's new. Smells new.

The back 150-feet of the room has been hollowed straight down to Subfloor Twelve and sheathed in stainless steel walls. In front of Tony, a glass observation window stretches from wall-to-wall. Against that window, a row of new tables, new computers, new screens, new equipment, new controls, and new chairs sit ready – and blood-splattered from the new mess he and Tony had made.

It's a control room.

For what, though?

And where –

Tony shoots a repulsor beam at the glass and doesn't wait for it shatter to the ground, before he soars through to the other side.

"They're down here," Tony announces.

Relief trickles through Sam:  _they're here_.

Sam follows through, figuring "they're down here" means "they're in cages," or "they're tied up," or "they're unconscious."

Sam stops next to Tony, both of them hovering well, well above the floor.

No question: it's a tempura casualty whatever Tony had called it.

A story below them, a…machine about eight feet tall and six feet wide sits on a black metal base. That base supports a double-helix made of thin black granite. That double-helix ferociously spins, while yellow-orange light arcs across, around, and about the granite – sizzling at the tip.

Steve's shield waits for him, deeply embedded in the metal of the machine's base.

Most importantly: Steve, Natasha, and Sharon are down there. But they're frozen, like statues, each of them unmoving and completely, totally still, caught in various actions.

Steve: in perfect shield-throwing form, feet planted, right elbow cocked back, left hand extended out. He had  _just_  thrown the shield, when…whatever happened.

Natasha: handgun aimed at a soldier, a bullet fired – and even that bullet waits, time standing still.

Sharon: another soldier with his arms around her from the back, while she uses that soldier as a springboard to kick the fuck out of another guy. That guy's blood-tinged spit hangs suspended in the air, his helmet mid-crack, body twisted as it started a hard drop to the ground.

And, behind the back of the machine, nearly unnoticed by Sam: a white-coat scientist with long, white hair and black-rimmed glasses, ducking near a corner, arms bending over her head.

"Look up," Tony instructs. "And don't go near that thing. It's giving off major gravitational waves; it's why they're stuck."

Sam obliges and sees that a narrow portion of all the floors above them have been excavated into a thin silo. As far as he can see, stainless steel coats the walls, all the way, up, up, up, into 200 hundred or so feet of deep darkness.

HYDRA's been busy.

"This thing is going to go, and we're gonna go with it," Tony says, a tinge of panic in his voice. "I guarantee you: we'll end up back out there, and we'll never know the difference. They're fucking with shit they have no business fucking with."

Sam puts his attention back on the double-helix and its arcing yellow-orange light. Maybe it's because Tony has him spooked, or maybe because he's really seeing a difference, but the light seems brighter, stronger, quicker, as if it's gaining power and gearing up to do something.

"Sir, gamma radiation levels are increasing," JARVIS cuts in.

The machine is going to do whatever it does, and –

"Do you know how to turn this off?" Sam asks, his own voice now more than tinged with contagious panic.

Sam looks to Tony, forgetting that all he can see is Iron Man's stoic façade. Whatever Tony is thinking, feeling – Sam doesn't know, and  _that_ freaks him out.

"Sir, levels are crit—"

"I got it!" Tony snaps.

The yellow-orange light turns to thick bands of same colored energy, twirling, and whirling, arcing and sizzling up to the tip of the helix. The broken glass on the ledge next to Sam's shoulder rattles, while all that stainless steel begins to sing with the rumble of bubbling, invisible energy.

A missile launcher pops out of Tony's right shoulder, as his repulsors begin to burn. "I'm gonna kill it. Grab Carter. I've got Romanoff. Cap'll be fine."

Ironically, Sam doesn't have the time to say "are you out of your fucking mind?!" He doesn't have time to second guess. And they – they don't have the time to think this through.

Tony blasts downward, and Sam follows, eyes only on Sharon, wings ready and primed to wrap around them both.

Sam hears a  _pop!_ and then the hissing, angry tail of a missile zooming toward its target: that black base, with hopefully all the brains and power of the machine.

The  _roar_ of an explosion fills his ears, a second before he smacks into Sharon, yanks her out of the soldier's grip, folds his wings around them, and –

***

Six hundred meters from the building entrance, Rhodes drops Barnes onto the ground and lands. Deeply and densely surrounded by conifers, they're all but invisible and a hair outside the loop radius.

Fully suited, Rhodes comes up on Barnes' left shoulder, War Machine metal scraping against gleaming silver HYDRA metal.

The gamma source is thirteen floors down, all the way at the bottom. The shielding means comms won't work inside. Rhodes will be as blind out here as Barnes will be in there.

"I'll be out here. If you can't hear me on comms, come back here."

That's good advice. Seriously.

Barnes looks down at his watch, fingers poised to set the stopwatch. "I'll be in there."

Four seconds later, Rhodes announces the gamma burst.

Barnes runs.

He knows exactly when he crosses into the loop – it turns from a bright, blue, late morning sky to a gray, starless dusk. At once, it's both incredible and incredibly creepy.

The beauty of adrenaline is in how it masks so much sin. His neck doesn't ache. His thigh doesn't burn. His shoulder isn't stiff. He's not tired. He's nowhere near full capacity but he's close damned enough.

"Blackbird, War Machine. This is your third loop. Comms cut as you enter the complex. First loop, you ran straight through the stairwell on floor One. Second loop, you got off on Four."

 _Great_.

"Acknowledged." Barnes picks a floor out of thin air. "I'm going to Six."

Confident that Rhodes has his back, Barnes tears into the open meadow, plows through the base's hidden metal door, and sprints into a brightly lit hallway.

With the lights on, the base is nearly completely different. Still old and dank, with the distinctive smell of moisture-ridden concrete reminiscent of spiders and insects. Water still  _drip, drip, drips_  from somewhere inside the walls.

Three years ago, he'd been inside this building, a different person who thought he didn't care about Steve. A different person who only knew Sam from a flipping, crunching vehicle and a relentless, violent attack on the blacktop of a helicarrier. A different person who didn't know to remember Natasha.

They make this world a place worth keeping. He's going to bring them home.

The hallway is empty, and he sprints through it to a stairwell. He takes the steps two at a time, each footfall loudly  _clanging_.

He doesn't know if he gets killed somewhere along here, or if he can't turn the fucking  _whatever_  off in time. Knowing that he's failed twice already isn't helpful.

Each steel door is numbered with its floor. He passes "2" and "3" and shoots straight past "5."

He pulls open the door for Six, glimpses a wall of yellow-orange light, feels minty cold, and –

The beauty of adrenaline is in how it masks so much sin. His neck doesn't ache. His thigh doesn't burn. His shoulder isn't stiff. He's not tired. He's nowhere near full capacity but he's close damned enough.

"Blackbird, War Machine. This is your sixth loop. Comms cut as you enter the complex. First loop, you ran straight through the stairwell. Second loop, you got off on Four. Third loop, you got off on Six. Fourth loop, you got off on Two. Fifth loop, I have no idea what you did."

Barnes stops dead cold. " _Six_?"

"Affirmative – Floor Six. What are you doing?"

He's not doing a sixth god damn loop. He can count on one full metal hand how many missions he failed for HYDRA, and  _that's if_  each helicarrier counts as one time each. Six failures  _don't fucking happen_.

Going in from the top down isn't possible.

Barnes sprints back to Rhodes' position, pleasantly surprised when he's able to cross the loop radius without issue. He wonders if he'll be able to stay out here, or if he'll end back in the meadow in fifty minutes.

"Drop me off at the town."

Rhodes' electronic eyes glow red. His metal-masked face is etched into a permanent frown. It's  _creepy._ "The HYDRA town? Kozerska?"

"The building's only thirteen stories. Kozerska has a tunnel that goes straight to Thirteen. This is the last loop; let's go."

Rhodes' huge metal head shakes, but his huge metal hands grab onto Barnes, and they fly the short distance to the town.

A safe distance out, in the forest beyond the meadow, a forest Barnes never wants to see again in his life, Rhodes drops Barnes onto the ground and then blasts into the sky, weapons out and aimed.

Barnes runs, confident that Rhodes has his back. The white brick buildings and mossy cracked roads beyond him, he tears into the open meadow, thirteen seconds until he sails past the rotted wooden railcars.

He wants SHIELD to drop a bomb or two on this whole place, once all of this is over. Who cares what the Polish military thinks.

"Snipers on the rooftops. Keep going. I've got them."

Barnes doesn't bother answering. He's not stopping for a gun fight, knife fight, or a fist fight, and he's not slowing down to second guess Rhodes' ability to make this happen.

He hits the mossy pavement and darts right around a building, and then left around another.

Gunfire pelts against the old bricks. Retaliatory explosions shake the ground, screams echoing.

Footstep after footstep, he runs the streets like he's run them before. He's beyond adrenaline. Beyond fear. He's nothing but a pounding heart, livewire muscles, too-loud breaths, and precise focus.

A group of soldiers dart in front of him, fifty meters out, weapons aimed and ready – and they disappear in a cloud of smoke, debris, and red mist.

He doesn't look at them.

He rounds another building, and another, and another, until the tunnel's wrought-iron gate comes into sight.

He doesn't slow down.

He doesn't sto—

His body flings forward, instantly cold, instantly numb. Face down, he slides across the cracked concrete and moss. Behind him, he hears a long, drawn-out  _thud_ , and, in his ear, he hears a long, drawn-out shout –  _Barnes!_

His body jerks out choked breaths.

_Barnes!_

He can smell the old stone, decades within it. The chlorophyll of the moss, like the cosmodrome. Blood, always blood.

 _Barnes_!

It's quiet. No cicadas. No crickets. No frogs.

 _Barnes_!

He moves his left arm and makes it push his body over, so he can see the dipped low sun and the dark blue, starless sky.

" _That one's Orion, Buck. Do you see it?"_

His vision fades to splotches of gray and swaths of black, and, within it, he does. He sees Orion in the sky.

Seven. He'll get it on seven.

Barnes runs, confident that Rhodes has his back. The white brick buildings and mossy cracked roads beyond him, he tears into the open meadow and past the rotted wooden railcars. He wants SHIELD to drop a bomb or two on this whole place, once all of this is over.

"Snipers on the rooftops. Keep going. I've got them. Watch out for the tunnel – it's heavily covered."

Barnes doesn't bother answering. He's not stopping for a gun fight, knife fight, or a fist fight, and he's not slowing down to second guess Rhodes' ability to make this happen.

He hits the mossy pavement and darts right around a building, and then left around another. Gunfire pelts the bricks, and explosions shake the ground, screams echoing.

He's beyond adrenaline. Beyond fear. He's nothing but a pounding heart, livewire muscles, too-loud breaths, and precise focus.

Footstep after footstep, he runs the streets like he's run them before. A group of soldiers dart in front of him, fifty meters out, weapons aimed and ready – and they disappear in a cloud of smoke, debris, and red mist.

He doesn't look at them.

He rounds another building, and another, and another, until the tunnel's wrought-iron gate comes into sight. He doesn't slow down. He doesn't stop.

A building fucking explodes behind him, pelting him with metal and rock, the ground rumbling under his feet. He inhales a cloud of dust, lungs rebelling with aborted coughs he doesn't dare have time to expel.

Twenty meters.

He runs, step after step after step.

Bullets  _pop-pop-pop_  behind him, beside him, in front of him, all around him.

 _Thud-thud-thud-thud_ echoes behind him, beside him, all around him – soldiers dropping, one by one.

"Keep going."

Step.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Barnes crashes through the gate at top speed and, still, does not stop. He pulls out his lighted, scoped CZ-75, flips on the light, and darts through the pedestrian tunnel. The light uselessly bobs – but it, at least, shows one thing: no one in front of him.

"Thirty-three minutes, Blackbird. You've got this."

He runs faster, counting down a clock in his head, sparing every second. This is the loop. Has to be – before Rhodes runs out of ammunition, before he never has a chance of making it through the town.

Barnes clears the tunnel, bolts across the expansive mezzanine, and bounds down several flights of a steep, decayed staircase. The treads dissolve under every careless step.

It's darker without the light from the deteriorating ceiling, and he's only following his bobbing light, a memorized fifty-year-old map, and the grace of his augmented eyesight.

He catches the curve a moment before he hits it, rounding it by the crumbling edge. He hits the east platform and is overtaken by an inconvenient gut punch.

Three years ago, standing right here, he saved his first life in seven decades: Sam's, with Steve's shield on his arm.

It means nothing for today, but it means something.

Barnes pushes through an unmarked gray door and stops two steps onto the mezzanine of the thirteenth subfloor.

He stretches his eyes upward.

"War Machine, time?"

Static.

 _Super_.

The ceiling is a jagged, crumbled hole, allowing him to see straight up to what looks like Eleven and Twelve.

Dust, chunks of concrete, and bits of flooring hang suspended between floors.

Fully-armored, Stark body-hugs Natasha, his arms and legs wrapped around her. She has a sidearm in her hand, honed anger on her face. They don't move, and they don't fall: both of them are suspended mid-air, mid-fall, mid-crash.

Likewise, Sam's arms and wings are wrapped around someone with blonde hair, and that could only be Sharon. Like Stark and Natasha, they don't move, and they don't fall: both of them stuck mid-fall.

Steve's hair is singed, civilian clothes burnt, facial skin lightly blistered. There's no floor under his feet, but he's caught at the end of a form-perfect throw of his shield.  _Why no pie, Steve._

They are each frozen inside a moment in time. Hopefully alive.

A couple of HYDRA soldiers float, unmoving and mostly dead. That's just…weird. He thinks about shooting them, in case they're not dead. He doesn't waste the time.

A large black machine has crashed onto the mezzanine, puckering and cracking the old subway tile. Off-kilter, it leans extremely to the right.

A black base houses a core made of some sort of thin, black granite, twisted into the shape of a double-helix. It rapidly, ferociously, silently spins. The base itself is mangled and burnt, but apparently, not badly enough to count.

None of that's a big deal.

In a two-meter radius around the entire machine, a brilliant, yellow-orange light pulses from light yellow to dark yellow to darker orange. The light changes its hue every two seconds, pulsing light, pulsing dark, pulsing darker, and then back to light again.

That light extends well beyond the twirling tip of the double-helix, up through the ceiling, into the other floors. Because of the machine's extreme tilt, it's almost like that light is aimed at only the left side of the complex: it doesn't touch the team, but it has swollen into the stairwell up to the rest of the complex.

An instinct tells him it would be a mistake to touch that light, and he wonders if five wipes in the other loops meant that he  _had_.

The space directly above him, where the team's literally hanging out, is free and clear of the light, of the machine, of  _anything_ – so why…

Why are they all stuck?

"What the hell." Well. " _How_ the hell."

 _Find the off switch_. Banner's fantastic advice.

He estimates he only has twenty-five minutes left; he glances at his watch but finds it's all zeroes. Twenty-five minutes goes fast, when you have no fucking idea what you're doing.

Barnes stays put, careful to keep away from the pulsing yellow-orange light, careful to avoid whatever invisible shit is keeping everyone else frozen, and visually scans for Banner's off switch.

The double-helix itself has nothing on it, and neither does the black base. An off-switch wouldn't have been built on the machine itself; they'd never be able to get to –

A long, single tendril of yellow-orange light curls toward him. He sees it out of the corner of his peripheral and hops sideways.

The tendril reaches: gentle somehow. Desperate somehow. Inexplicably, he thinks of Shakespeare Garden –

The black luminaire.

The leaning, red tulips.

The cobblestone path.

The brass drinking fountain.

Sunlight filtering through cherry blossoms.

That tendril is  _inches_ from his face, reaching, stretching, lurking.

He takes another step back and  _has to fucking end this_.

The tendril follows him, branching into multiple, wispy strands.

He looks to the stairwell: it's consumed by the light. Going up means being frozen. Going back the way he'd come means leaving them behind and looping again.

It's at that moment he realizes: life doesn't always work out. Sometimes, there isn't a solution. Isn't an answer. Isn't a fix. Sometimes, everyone dies, and no one goes home.

There's no "off switch."

There's no way out of this.

In twenty minutes, he's going to forget it all happened and come do this again.

A deafening, metallic  _CLUNK-CLANK_ rings through the mezzanine, loud enough that it shakes the dust and gravel at his feet. Chunks of floor and ceiling crash down, some shattering on impact, others creating crushed indentations.

The double-helix slows its spinning, while the yellow-orange light flickers, flickers, flickers, incrementally down, down, down. The tendril retreats, then disappears.

_What the fuck…_

He hadn't done anything. He'd given up.

_How the hell._

More concrete chunks and debris collapse from above, many of them violently striking and bouncing off the machine on their path downward. A block crashes a half a meter from his feet.

A handful of HYDRA soldiers rain to the floor:  _thud, thud, thud_.

Barnes retreats a few steps, only to avoid the debris path, but his eyes lock on the scene unfolding above him.

Sam's wings extend, Sharon wrapped securely in his arms, and he shoots up to what looks like a ledge or a room. What he yells down to the others is unexpected: "There's somebody up here!"

That somebody had to have been the one to turn it off. Why?

Steve craters to the ground, narrowly missing the machine, and immediately launches toward the stairwell.

Even before Sam yelled, Stark's already flying upward, an alive and moving Natasha unhappy to be carried. Thing is: there's no floor. It's go up or go down.

"Freeze!" Sharon orders. "Stop moving!"

 _Freeze_. Funny.

In the middle of it all, Barnes walks the short distance to the stairwell and plops onto the second tread. His left leg screams agony with the motion, while the rest of him – feels tired, empty, out of gas.

He'd only come to the stairs, so he could prop his neck on one of the steps. When he does it, it feels good.

Adrenaline pulses away like that light, the last handful of exhausting, nerve-wracking days piling up within seconds. He could sleep right here, and so he stretches back, neck supported by broken concrete, and closes his eyes.

"What part of 'knock it the fuck off' did you not understand? Hands off the computer." Sounds like Stark.

Barnes hits his comm. "War Machine, it's off. They're all here."

He expects a return of static but is pleasantly surprised when he hears Rhodes' voice, loud and clear. "Copy. T-minus ten minutes until the potential loop. I'm holding back to confirm and will rendezvous in fifteen."

The machine had blocked communication.

"Is that—" Steve.

Fuck it; he's done. No question, he really could fall asleep right here, in this shitty HYDRA base while the Avengers avenge.

"Rhodey? That you?" Stark.

"Bucky?!" None other than Steve.

"We're not asking again. Step off." Natasha.

He listens to their each of their voices. They're all here and alive. All of them. No matter who's up there, or why that person had turned off the machine - talk about a good day.

_Thud!_

Steve suddenly puts his hands on his neck, checking for a pulse, and Barnes bats him away. "I'm not  _dead_. I'm sleeping."

_Ziiiip._

His vest. Steve unzipped Barnes' vest.

"Christ, Buck. Didja—"

Barnes yelps. Unexpected, severe pain cuts through his abdomen and mid-back. Reflexively, he pushes Steve's hands away, eyes snapping open. Steve's dripping, blood-caked hands go straight back to Barnes' stomach, applying unpleasant pressure.

Oh.

"Stop, idiot," Steve chides, "or you're gonna be."

Barnes tilts his head back. "You're an idiot, idiot."

Steve laughs, and that's something worth looking at. Steve's face is dirty and somewhat burnt, hair dusted a little gray with soot and singe, but his smile is real, and Barnes will be damned if it doesn't set the world straight. Steve's not – not that person in Berlin.

 _Berlin_.

The thought of Steve being that, like that, gives Barnes all the energy he needs. "I want up. Help me up."

Steve damn near picks him up, but he at least sets him on his feet, hands steady around his body. He feels tearing, enough that he catches a gasp in the back of his throat, but he doesn't care. He really doesn't.

The only thing that matters is wrapping Steve in a bear hug, tight enough that his hands make easy fists of Steve's tactical vest. "You okay?" he asks.

Steve hugs him back, strong and square. "Never better. You—you're—"

"Real fucking swell."

Steve laughs again and tightens his arms. The sound of Steve's voice and the thrumming of his heart –

Sam's voice booms "Hey, no, don't move, don't move!" at the same time a hand gun fires— _BANG!_ —and a blinding  _blue_  glow swells from the bottom of the machine. It damn near touches Steve's feet.

Barnes spins Steve around and uses his left arm to launch him into the stairwell. Once and again, his left leg gives out, his core weak enough that he can't regain his balance.

He falls backward, as a red and gold blur shoots past – and the pulse explodes into a blinding, consuming flash of blue.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 8: The Only Certain Future._

/***/

Steve drives the entire two hours to Leipzig, Tony asleep for half the drive.  He follows the signs on Highway 9 for Flughafen Leipzig/Halle.

On Highway 14, the speedometer needle hovers just right of 90 when he sees that the road ahead is inaccessible.  The overpass is gone, collapsed into a charred heap of concrete rubble and –

Steve nearly veers off the road, tires skidding, and this time not because Tony littered.

Tony startles awake. “What, hey...  What?”

Steve pulls over, hands white-knuckled around the steering wheel.  The car hasn’t even stopped moving when Tony stumbles out, sunglasses in his hand.

Steve’s seatbelt snaps back into its housing.  He steps out of the car, leaving the door open, and braces his arms on the car’s roof. He forces himself to look.

The terminal is a burnt husk, the amputated blue tail of a Lufthansa jet next to the skeletal baggage claim. Two of the parking lots are filled bumper to bumper with blackened shells of cars.  Yellow plane wreckage—wings, an engine, seats, luggage—joins the debris. 

The road ahead of them is no different: blackened, burnt, charred. Plane seats, luggage, and the broken shell of a Transcontinental United fuselage scatter through an adjacent field of dirt.

If Leipzig is like this, the rest of the world is like this.  The Tower may not even be standing.

“Tell me this isn’t our world, Tony.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I appreciate it.
> 
> The next chapter is a little fun, then we're into the SHIELD days.


	8. The Only Certain Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No Avengers. No SHIELD. No JARVIS. No team. Empty skies. Quiet comms. Vehicles wrecked. Trains derailed. Subway cars crashed onto streets. Buses overturned. Main thoroughfares flooded. The ever-bustling, never-stop-moving City that never sleeps stands vacant. Empty. Still. Alone.
> 
> Either the world ended, or they did.
> 
> Barnes, Steve, and Tony explore the mysteries of an abandoned, empty world that ended on November 4, 2016. The only way home is -- well. Nowhere would be easy, but that god damn place is impossible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: a strong allusion to a couple major characters (not Bucky!) dying off screen. Brief interpersonal violence.
> 
> Otherwise, this one is meant to be a sort of fun way around Lots of Exposition, before the series plows into a last half that is mostly plot-based action and some really, really dark times for our heroes.

_Creak, creak, creak, creak_.

Steve doesn't bother being quiet. He jogs up the wooden steps to the fifth floor landing and heads left, to the corner unit.

The handle isn't broken. The name plate reads O'Neil, J.

Resigned, Steve forces the door open and steps into a somewhat familiar apartment. The countertops are bare except for mummified fruit and root vegetables. The coffee table is the same – but new, smooth, and shiny. No tower of books. No TV. No Pepsi cans. No musk of hair cream, gun solvent, coffee, and tobacco.

Steve walks through the living room to a closed white door. He opens it, goes inside, and finds a closet of dark-colored women's clothes, a twin bed covered by a purple comforter, and a Manchester United poster pinned to the wall.

Vanquished, Steve heads back into the hallway, the door left open behind him. No one exists to worry about it.

 _Creak, creak, creak, creak_. All the way down, steps taken two at a time, Steve pounds through the building's front door. It flies off its hinges and skitters onto the brick road, glass shattering and wood splintering.

Less than bothered, Tony sips a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino, winces, and tosses the full glass bottle behind their red Mercedes. "How do they manage to sell this to actual people?"

Steve's in no mood for Tony's shit. "Can you not."

Tony crosses his arms, inscrutable behind his expensive, tinted sunglasses. "Let me guess."

Bucky never lived here. Worse, he didn't come here, and, even more, he's not here now.

Tony tilts his head and sighs, the way he does when he thinks he's found everyone's perfect solution. "Word on the street is that he really likes nice hotels. Which, unfortunately, limits us to, oh, about—" Tony waggles his head back and forth, apparently counting. "—twenty, thirty."

On top of the four hospitals they'd searched in southern Kraków.

"If he even came to Berlin," Tony adds.

Maybe Tony thinks he's being helpful. Maybe he thinks Steve doesn't understand that there is an entire world that Bucky knows inside and out. Maybe he thinks Steve doesn't get that Bucky could be anywhere.

If.

Steve looks down at his charred gray shirt, still stained with Bucky's blood. Both sides of his arms are still swathed with it – both sides, because it'd been a through-and-through bullet, back to stomach – and the  _only_  sign that Bucky ended up in this empty world is a trail of  _old_ blood and gouged concrete worming through a stairwell in Poland.

"The GSW was bad," Steve says.

Tony pushes his sunglasses up into his hair, revealing tired, shadowed eyes. "You really think that guy decided to curl up somewhere and die?  _Him?_ "

That helps. It  _does_  sound ridiculous.

"Look," Tony starts.

Steve doesn't intend to let him end. "I'm not leaving without him."

"Never said we were. I'm ready to drop. You are too. I know a good hotel."

The sun is waning, and, with it, Steve's resolve.

Steve climbs into the passenger side of the Mercedes; Tony, in the driver's seat.

"If anyone can take care of themselves, it's him. So. We'll find him, and we'll find a way home. Got it, Cap?"

"Got it."

Tony drives on the wrong side of the road, speedometer tipping past 100 km/h through mostly empty streets. Only a few cars are on the road, most of them wrecked into street hazards, some of them parked along curbs. Bicycles parked on sidewalks and toppled inside road lanes rust and flake their sheen.

Out the window, thick green vines crawl up buildings, filling in bare spots where façades have peeled away; rashes of grasses and weeds bristle through cracked asphalt roads; and Steve swears he sees two wolves tear down an alley.

Whatever happened, it wasn't bombs, and it wasn't a virus. They've driven from Kraków to Berlin, the only vehicle roaring up E40, past enough cities to comprehend that the world is empty.

Not destroyed or sick or hiding.

By his feet, the last edition of  _Berliner Zeitung_  is dated 4 November 2016. The stories are mundane and routine, without warning that the end of the world was on its way.

Tony parks on the sidewalk, stopping the nose of the car an inch from the hotel building. Steve gets out and walks over two broken sliding doors, both likely blown straight out of their frames during a storm. Glass  _crunches_ underfoot.

For now, the cavernous hotel lobby is brightly lit by the natural light that spills through ornate, splintered windows. With the doors being open for so long, though, Steve worries about what might be living here.

Dressed in flimsy suit pants, a thin sweater, and sneakers, Tony crunches to the check-in desk and leans against it, fingers tapping his watch, a bag of pistachios in his free hand.

Steve can only watch him, disbelieving even though he knows he shouldn't be. "Really."

Tony shrugs and crunches a nut. "I'm telling you – the service here used to be so much better."

"You said you were tired."

"Okay. Sure. Would you like the Royal Bebel or the Humboldt Suite?"

Steve crosses his arms and bites back an angry comment. He wants time to decompress and roll in his own thoughts, and he has less and less energy to keep up with Tony. "Do you want bats or wild life? We stay low."

"Are you saying you wish I had my suit?"

The suit that's a worthless pile of junk in the car's trunk. Once it came off, it wouldn't go back on. No sat-linked JARVIS, no suit assembly, apparently.

"Now that you mention it," Steve replies and means it.

The first available set of rooms is on the fourth story, above three mezzanines of restaurants, stores, conference rooms, lounges, and ball rooms. Oh, yeah: and thick weaves of spider webs, two bat nests, a beehive, and who knows what else.

It occurs to Steve that they could've driven out of the city and stayed anywhere else but here. Too late now.

Tony behind him and strangely quiet, Steve kicks open a door, clears it for threats and confirms its window is intact, then walks back out. "All yours. I'll be next door."

"What – Hey. No!"

"I'm not sleeping with you, Tony. See you in the morning."

Next door, Steve happens into a substantially larger room, with two sets of solid windows, a bigger bed, and balcony access. Eyes fully adjusted to the moonlit dark, he closes the bathroom door as a precaution and looks through the darkness, seeing nothing alarming except for a brown spider tip-toeing up a peeling wall.

He bypasses the bed and opens the double-pane, French door onto the balcony. Outside, once upon a time, it must have been an incredible view of Opernplatz Square and the emerald dome of St. Hedwig's Cathedral. Not so much anymore.

Steve sits down in an orange, flaking metal chair and settles his elbows on his knees. Eyes stretched to the dark sky, he traces the constellations.

"That one's Orion, Buck," he says out loud. "I hope you see it."

***

Thirteen stories up, with landings between each floor. Each flight of stairs between floors has fourteen steps, all of them bathed in complete and total unlit darkness.

One-hundred and eighty-two steps. That's it. That's nothing.

Barnes doesn't bother stopping to evaluate, dread, or reconsider. He needs to get out of here before HYDRA comes.

Left hand gripped around the gray hand rail, his CZ waiting ready in his right hand, he lifts his left leg, puts his foot down on the step, and pushes the weight of his body up. It's more than excruciating; it feels like his thigh  _and_ abdomen  _and_ back have been doused in gasoline and set on fire from the inside out.

His knee buckles, and he catches himself with his left hand. He pulls the hand rail out of the wall, bolts bouncing down the metal steps, as he falls flat onto his back. He stares up at a dark ceiling that, a few minutes ago, had been a giant fucking hole.

The Winter Soldier, ladies and gentlemen.

He still is.

He is.

He flips onto his stomach and pushes himself up, the fingers of his left hand gouging into the concrete. Hopping onto his right leg, hand braced against the wall for support, he dares put an ounce of weight on his left.

The gasoline pours, and the fire roars. The pain is nothing. It  _can't be_ anything.

The rectus femoris is a hell of a name for a thigh muscle, but it's the one that had been shredded by HYDRA's hollow point. It'd been doing okay until the last dozen hours, and, particularly, until now. The partly healed muscle twitches, spasms, and seizes, carrying with it a tight, burning feeling that travels down to his knee.

All of the strength disintegrates, and it's not a matter of  _I won't_ or  _I will_ or  _I'm getting through this_.

He's left standing on his right leg, human fingers scratching into the wall, stranded under thirteen stories of a HYDRA stronghold, dripping blood from a fresh gunshot wound. Undoubtedly, he'd picked  _that_  up during his little jog through Kozerska.

Barnes looks up the impossible first flight of steps, enhanced vision only somewhat cutting through the darkness.

One-hundred and eighty-two.

He shuffles the plates on his arm and rolls his right shoulder. The shoulder is stiff and achy, but it'll make it.

He'll make it.

CZ-75 tucked into his right thigh holster, he doesn't crawl up the stairs, or drag himself up the stairs. He  _moves strategically_  up the stairs, backwards like a crab, his left arm the only part of himself he can rely on.

In under one minute, his right arm trembling, he makes it to Twelve, backs himself into the landing's corner, and draws and aims his CZ-75, its light still shining strong.

In the darkness, there is nothing. His face burns, and, although he tells himself it's because of blood loss and pain, the reality is that it's a shade of panic.

Only one certain future exists here. Any minute, HYDRA will storm the stairs and try to take him alive. That last part won't happen. He won't let –

A thought suffocates him. With it, he nearly hyperventilates: dizzy, overwhelmed, gut wringing, brain churning through the implications. He blames the blood loss again.

" _Three months ago, you killed yourself inside a HYDRA base in the Tabernas Desert."_

Do they grab him here and use that machine to… And then Steve. Somehow, they get Steve, too.

He's only wasting precious time, and, by sitting still, he's only ensuring that it happens.

He pushes himself to the base of the next flight of stairs, right leg and arms doing all the work. He doesn't overlook the cold, wet, growing stain on his left pant leg, but there's nothing he can do about it right now.

Up Twelve, Eleven, and Ten, he backs himself into the corner of Nine's landing, quiets his too-loud breathing, and listens.

Dripping water is the only sound he hears, beyond the wild thumping of his heart. No voices. No footsteps. No inhuman banging like in '15. If he would've told himself back then that he'd be here now, he probably would've shot himself.

Up Nine, Eight, and Seven, HYDRA still doesn't come. Barnes lowers his CZ and its light into his lap. The darkness spins, a child's top whirling around the surface of a table, nearing its edge, closer, closer, until  _plop_.

Heart palpitating, breathing rapid, he opens his eyes. He can hardly discern the outline of the steps for Six. On the floor next to him, the light on his CZ is completely dead. He thinks he passed out.

He crawls toward Six, left hand burrowing into the metal –  _clang, clang, clang, clang –_ step after step after step.

He won't die in here. Anywhere but here.

Five then Four and he stops counting.

He stops stopping.

Although the steps are endless, time stretches with them. He doesn't know if it's been minutes or hours or days, and he doesn't care. The world exists in a litany of step,  _clang,_ step,  _clang_ , step,  _clang._

Step,  _clang._

Step,  _clang._

Step,  _clang._

 _Clang_.

He collapses onto his back and pushes himself a few meters across the floor with his right leg. He peers upward and barely makes out a "1" painted on the closed door.

No more steps.

Still no HYDRA.

With his left arm, he reaches up and pries his fingers between the door and its frame, opening it. His arm still extended, he claws his fingers into the concrete floor and pulls his body through the opening.

Like he remembers, the hallway is utterly dark. Drips of water  _plink_  echoes down the damp walls, while stagnant vapor hangs in the cool air. It reeks of mildew – and fresh air, gusting through the broken doorway carved into the grassy hill.

 _Why is it broken? It hadn't been_.

He doesn't move strategically through the hallway. He crawls, his left leg all but a dead weight, his dignity waiting for him at that door. His left palm  _crunches_ against dead leaves and broken layers of concrete, while his right palm collects bits of gravel and concrete shards.

He follows the air, feeling it grow colder, smelling it become fresher, hearing it become louder, seeing the outline of the door frame, tasting the pine of the conifer valley, hand over hand, again and again, and –

He makes it. He fucking makes it.

Outside of the base, he collapses onto the long, crunchy grass of the meadow, back flat on the ground. Above, the sky is dark black and filled with a thousand pinpricks of stars.

On habit alone, he picks one constellation out of hundreds, never happier than now to see Orion shining in the night sky. He laughs too hard for his body to handle.

The laugh transforms into wracking coughs, his body instinctively curling to protect itself, but he keeps on laughing – panic breaking, dread evaporating, and euphoria engulfing him.

He might yet die, but HYDRA isn't in the base. They aren't out here. They aren't anywhere.

After too long, he finally thinks to wonder,  _Why?_

He rolls onto his back again and blearily peers up at the inky, star-strewn sky.

This valley is surrounded by cities, like Kraków and Myslenice, that emit too much light for the stars to ever be this bright.

No jet contrails.

No sounds, all the world's permeating white noise gone, like when he was a tiny kid in the 1910's on a farm in Plainfield.

No Avengers, no SHIELD, no team. A year ago, he would've been confident that they'd left him behind. No question, he knows that they wouldn't have. Not Steve, Natasha, or Sam.

He flops his right hand to his ear comm and taps it. "JARVIS?"

Nothing.

"Rhodes?"

Nothing.

"Sam?"

Nothing.

"HYDRA? It's me. Seventeen."

Not even them.

He thinks he's alone here.  _There doesn't seem to be anyone around._

He laughs again, a short little burst, not regretting a god damn thing.

As bright as he's ever seen, Orion shines from hundreds of thousands of miles away, reminding him that he's a speck, a blink in colossal time.

"I see it, Steve," he says to no one.

***

At the bank of the Spree, Steve drenches his dirty t-shirt in the frigid water, and then scrubs his arms and face. It's cold and unsatisfying, but it gets the job done.

Once, long ago and not so long ago, in March 1944, he and Bucky had pulled over in Mannheim and done the same thing in the Neckar. Gunpowder, dust, grime, and even some blood from the Frankfurt air raid sieved off their skin.

"No water bill," Bucky had said, not looking as tired or as cold as he should have. Dipped in the cold water, his hands glowed a healthy pink. Hindsight being what it is, Steve should have known then about Bucky's serum. "It's an idea."

Steve had laughed. "I'll give you ten bucks, if you do this in the East River. Manhattan side."

With a wide grin, Bucky had warned, "That's alotta money. Promises, Rogers."

"Yeah, well, you can buy yourself something real nice."

Steve drops his shirt in the water and watches it float downstream. The world's a big place, but it always, always goes back to the City.

Stark Tower. Common ground.

Excitement rippling under his skin, Steve dresses in new clothes from a store around the block and runs up a barren street. The Mercedes sticks out like a bright red sore thumb, and so does Tony, in his new designer clothes from some place called Trueffelschwein.

"How do we get to New York?" Steve asks.

Tony leans against the car, arms crossed, and peers at Steve from over the rim of another new pair of sunglasses. "Thought we weren't leaving him."

"We're not," Steve answers with an authority he hasn't felt in over a year. "He would go to the Tower."

Tony bites his cheek, just like Natasha, and then clicks his tongue. "Yep. Good idea. I've got a jet stashed in Leipzig. Wanna drive?"

Steve drives, while Tony munches through a box of granola bars, grinds a cup of legitimately gourmet coffee beans, and cold presses his own coffee. He tosses the trash out the window.

In the rearview, Steve watches two wrapper-stuffed plastic bottles bounce along the road.

"Really? It's still littering."

"Unbunch your panties, Captain Planet. There's no one left to care."

Steve hadn't meant it  _entirely_  seriously. Tony's response, though…

"I do," Steve says.

"I  _don't_."

Even as a scrawny kid, he wouldn't have been able to resist the outright challenge. That hadn't gotten any better with the serum, and it sure as hell hasn't gotten any better in the last six years.

Steve slams on the brakes, burning rubber as the car skids to a stop.

Tony brings a white-sneakered foot up to the dash, to stop himself from lurching forward. He sips his nice-smelling coffee, eyes forward, and checks his buffed, billion-dollar nails.

Steve shifts the car into reverse, pops an arm behind the seat, twists his body around, and drives to behind where the bottles fitfully dart across the asphalt. He puts the car into park.

"Go get'em."

Tony slides his seat all the way back and props his feet on the dashboard, ankles crossed. "How 'bout  _no_."

Steve cuts the engine. "I can do this all day."

"Want some coffee for your wait? I made enough."

"Your shoes are stupid."

"And you're the worst driver I've ever had. No tip for you."

***

Five kilometers northeast sounds better as three miles northeast. So: three miles. It's hardly anything.

A few hours ago, he landed Quinjet Two in a clearing that far from the base. It has communication equipment, medical supplies, and, best of all, flight capabilities.

The density of the forest is his advantage. He uses the trees as makeshift crutches, unsteadily hopping from trunk to trunk, letting his left arm carry the burden.

His vision isn't as clear as it typically is and doesn't cut through the night like he needs. Compared to the times he's walked into a dim room without realizing the lights were off, he feels blind.

Wet snowflakes splash against his face. Two owls  _hoot_. Bats squeak. Nocturnals scamper across the stiff, frozen foliage. Howls echo in the distance. Those sounds put him at ease.

After a time, he recognizes the dips in the terrain – the soft hills, the scraggly trees, and, particularly, the soft brown, thick, pocked trunk of an ancient giant. The jet's close.

He doesn't let the lure of the jet affect his pace. He keeps it steady and slow, not out of carefulness but out of ability, or lack thereof.  _It's bad_.

Barnes squints and sees a break in the trees. The clearing. It's only a hundred meters ahead.

He hops and hops, counting down the meters in his head—skipping numbers and losing track, but what the hell, no one knows but him—and stops at the edge of the tree line, his hand wrapped around a trunk.

Through the dark, he squints and peers, blinking and disbelieving.

All he sees are trees and grass.

No jet.

His eyes water, because of pain and blood loss. Not because they might have left him. Not because he's wasted three miles going deep into the middle of nowhere. Not because he's dozens of kilometers from any sort of civilization. Not because he could die here.

Barnes pushes his back against a tree trunk and forces himself to sit up instead of lie down. Boneless, he wraps his arms around himself and lets his eyes sink into restful darkness.

_No jet. Now what._

Kasinka Mala might be close. Tenczyn, maybe. Somewhere with a car to steal. Michašta is out of reach, too far in the wrong direction. Rabka is closest – and big enough to have a decent hospital.

Yeah. That's what he'll do. He'll go to Kasinka Mala, get himself a car, and drive to Rabka.

He opens his eyes, confused for a moment, before realizing that he must have fallen asleep.

In the bright daylight, four inches of pristine white snow coat the ground, dust the thickets of green conifers, and bury his hands and legs. A curtain of that fresh snow blows almost entirely sideways, carried by gusts of frigid wind.

His t-shirt sticks to his skin, soaked in sweat and frozen stiff with blood.

This reminds him of another time – a month after Insight, unknowingly struggling through withdrawal from decades of HYDRA's sedatives and narcotics, dry heaving in a Siberian blizzard. He'd hallucinated Steve, long buried memories bubbling to the surface.  _"Take care of yourself. You know how."_

It was good advice then. It's better advice today.

He bends his left leg, surprised by the decline in intensity of the pain. Through his pants, he touches the bullet wound, then presses, finding a round depression and a sharp shot of pain. He might be able to walk on it long enough to get to a vehicle.

Barnes pulls up his t-shirt and examines the bullet wound in the right side of his abdomen. It'd been a Soviet rifled hollow point, designed to take down super soldiers, the only kind of bullets he's seen from HYDRA in years. Red blood slowly oozes through a dam of natural clots, his body aggressively trying to heal the damage.

The snow might be helping. He'll take it.

Barnes struggles to his feet, hand propped against the tree, and eases weight onto his left leg. For now, it holds.

He heads south and prepares himself for a long, slow, exhausting trek through hilly forest. Like before, he moves from tree to tree, this time as a precaution rather than as a support.

He doesn't let himself think about the missing jet, or the too-quiet comms, or the empty base and the emptier sky. Answers are waiting in Rabka, and he'll wait until then to discover them.

It's all he has in him to focus on pushing one foot in front of the other, through centimeters of snow and winter foliage.

After an interminable set of punishing hours, his dragging footsteps don't scrape through snow, leaves, and brush but across the pavement of a narrow roadway. He brushes away a swath of snow to find pitted, ailing asphalt.

Roads lead to buildings, to people, and to transportation. He knows he should be excited or relieved—something like that—but exhaustion has frayed him numb.

He slowly heads west. As far as he can see, it's unbothered, clean snow. No one has been through here.

Airliners haven't passed overhead.

HYDRA hasn't ambushed him.

SHIELD hasn't found him.

His comm hasn't crackled.

No matter how many times he rearranges the facts in his head, he can't kick the certain feeling that something is very wrong.

He pushes the senseless thoughts, worry, and contemplation away. They're not helpful.

The road leads to a triangular, wood cabin, with a white SUV parked along its western side. The sign out front translates to "hostel." Refuge and transportation, exactly the two things he had been looking for.

Still that numbness. Still no relief.

Barnes skips the SUV and hauls himself up eight snow-covered steps, across a snowy deck, and up to a blond-wood door. Expecting it to be locked, he turns the handle and finds easy access to the foyer.

The floor is brown, square stone tile. The walls and ceiling are real wood, wallpapered by plaques, antlers, maps, and photos. Three hand-made, glossy-wood picnic tables; a cluttered, decorative fireplace; and an ice cream cooler fill out the room.

A part of him readies to explain that he doesn't have any money. Another part of him knows that no one is going to be here.

"Hello?"

He shouldn't have bothered. His voice is gone.

No one comes, anyway.

Eyes drawn to a stain near the ice cream cooler, he limps to it. His shoes stick to the floor, peeling from the tile like stickers on plastic. Inside, he finds thick globs of moldy wrappers.

Eyes swimming over the room, he notices the tufts of dust that coat the tabletops, the antlers, the photo frames, the mantel.

To his right, he pushes through a dulled yellow door, into a room that serves as an office and a concession area. Deftly organized bottles of sodas and bags of processed food sit on brown shelves. He picks up a soda bottle; the expiration date is July 2017.

On the desk, a neatly folded, unwrinkled newspaper is dated 4 November 2016, while unopened mail is postmarked for late October and early November 2016. He picks up the black handset of a wall-mounted phone: no dial tone.

Barnes rubs his right hand over his face, hard on his eyes, and decides to find the beds.

Back in the foyer, he sees a steep, narrow ladder leading to a second story.

_Fucking Christ._

He really doesn't want to climb that – but not as much as he really doesn't want to sleep on the cold floor.

He trades agony for a sliver of a room that is no more than two meters across. Its twin bed boasts a paper-thin mattress, two deflated pillows, and a hot pink wool blanket. Boots and socks off, tactical vest on the floor, pants unbuttoned, and his CZ-75 under a pillow, he thinks it's nothing less than absolutely fucking perfect.

***

Steve drives the entire two hours to Leipzig, Tony asleep for half the drive. He follows the signs on Highway 9 then Highway 14 for Flughafen Leipzig/Halle.

On Highway 14, the speedometer needle hovers just right of 90 when he sees that the road ahead is inaccessible. The overpass is gone, collapsed into a charred heap of concrete rubble and –

Steve nearly veers off the road, tires skidding, and this time not because Tony littered.

Tony startles awake. "What, hey... What?"

Steve pulls over, hands white-knuckled around the steering wheel. The car hasn't even stopped moving when Tony stumbles out, sunglasses in his hand.

Steve's seatbelt snaps back into its housing. He steps out of the car, leaving the door open, and braces his arms on the car's roof. He forces himself to look.

The terminal is a burnt husk, the amputated blue tail of a Lufthansa jet next to the skeletal baggage claim. Two of the parking lots are filled bumper to bumper with blackened shells of cars. Yellow plane wreckage—wings, an engine, seats, luggage—joins the debris.

The road ahead of them is no different: blackened, burnt, charred. Plane seats, luggage, and the broken shell of a Transcontinental United fuselage scatter through an adjacent field of dirt.

If Leipzig is like this, the rest of the world is like this. The Tower may not even be standing.

"Tell me this isn't our world, Tony."

Tony puts his sunglasses back on, hiding behind them. "They all came down at once. No emergency vehicles. Whatever happened—it was fast, okay. No one was on those planes." He waves a hand at the airport. "Clearly."

Not an answer. "Is this our world?"

"I know as much as you," Tony snaps. It's an honest, fair answer, and it's fucking infuriating. "We get to the City, we get to the Tower, I can see what I can find out. Hopefully, Macy's Day Parade decides to show up."

Macy's. Red star. Clever.

"JFK, Newark, LaGuardia," Steve says curtly. Any plane landing or taking off would've gone straight down or into buildings; those at cruise are probably mostly in the oceans. "What do you think it's going to look like?"

Tony inhales, deep and slow, and frowns. "Flooded. Let's see if the hangar's still here." As he gets back into the car, he spins an index finger and lobs a weak zinger. "Might wanna make a detour."

Might.

***

According to Barnes' watch, he's slept for fifty-two hours. Groggy and bleary, he rolls off the bed, hits his head on the slanted ceiling, and wanders through a few short hallways until he finds showers.

The cold faucets twist uselessly. Like in Hamningberg last year, orange stains streak down the creamy porcelain.

He groans out loud. "Motherfucker."

He goes back to the room he'd slept in and sits down on the bed, head cradled in his hands. He listens for sounds of people – breathing, talking, walking, hearts beating – and only hears the pounding of blood in his head and the roiling of his empty, hollow stomach.

 _Food_.

Barnes pulls on his boots and gross shirt, tucks his sidearm into the back of his loose waistband, and damn near falls down the stairs to the ground level.

He tears through a dozen or so bags of expired junk snack food, and even more weather-cold bottles of soda and water. It does little to settle his stomach.

Speaking of. He pulls up his dirty, stained t-shirt and finds a pocked knot of red, scarred skin. Though still sore and tender, he pushes on it, wondering where the bullet ended up – and notices an unfamiliar pulling sensation in his back.

With his right hand, he reaches around and finds a similar spot of raised, tender skin, way, way too close to his spine. His fingers come away specked with dried blood.

A through-and-through with a relatively straight path. He's lucky not to be dead or paralyzed, and he knows it.

He doesn't check his leg. Although it's still painful, it easily carries his weight. All things considered, he's in good shape.

Outside, the day is quiet, clear, and bright, with a deep blue, unmarred sky overhead. The snow has settled into thirteen centimeters of packed, sparkling, undisturbed whiteness.

He pushes his comm into his ear and taps it, uselessly radioing his codename to anyone listening.

A fine bead of panic trickles through him, from the back of his neck, down his arm, all the way to his gut. Fifty hours ago, it'd felt unreal, like it was him that was the problem, rather than the rest of the world.

It's not him.

Barnes yanks open the rusted driver's side door of the SUV and finds the key stashed in the visor. He churns the engine, over and over and over again, whispering "c'mon, c'mon" – until it turns, exhaust spitting out a  _bang!,_  the entire body shuddering.

The engine settles into a rickety idle. He shifts into gear and drives east, intending to get all the distance he can before it breaks down.

The narrow road is entirely covered in snow and nearly indistinguishable from the shoulder but for the sheath of thick trees that line either side. He doesn't take it slow, not at all: he plows straight through every drift and curve at about 96 km/h.

After a time, the forested mountain eases into a rural residential area with gated driveways, triangular once-were white houses, and even a school with a sun-bleached playground on the left. As he goes, the houses become larger (and weather damaged), the gates more ornate (and rusted), and the houses more colorful (and sun-faded). No people.

Around the next curve, a sea of red-roofed, snow-tipped houses come into view. None of them show the slightest heat loss or even ice dams hanging from the gutters. It's a good 4 degrees Celsius—not terribly cold—but… Cold enough to be running the heat.

A little further down, the road widens, telephone poles on one side and a cemetery on the other. With houses, apartments, and stores on both sides of the road, it's obvious that he's made it into a town.

Streets aren't plowed.

Parked vehicles haven't been brushed or scraped.

No one's driving – no cars, no tire tracks.

No people out walking.

He stops at a snow-dusted, faded-red stop sign. It intersects a highway; on the corners, a Sklep pizzeria and a grocery store, both buildings a little worse for wear.

Barnes turns south and drives thirty kilometers to Rabka, not passing one car and not seeing one person. He follows signs to the train station and doesn't even know why the hell he bothers.

He parks in the middle of the street, by the unplowed rail crossing, and sloshes up to the station.

The bright green paint on its long porch rail peels, spots flecked away by the elements. A once-was white and black clock lies on the ground; half-buried in snow, its face is yellowed and shattered. Way above on the facade of the entrance, the name of the station and the town—Rabka Zdrój—is missing five letters. The building's half-moon, grand window is a spiderweb of shadowed, shattered glass.

He forces his way in through a locked front door, steps in to the station's lobby, and finds dim darkness.

It's 0830 at a small station where most of the trains run by 1200, and he finds not a single soul.

Either the world ended, or he did.

No cars in the streets. No cars in the parking lots. Locked train station doors. No bodies. No burned down buildings, because stoves or curling irons had been left on while cigarettes burned. No graffiti; there's always graffiti.

Whatever happened, it happened late – probably 0230, 0300. It happened fast, too, and to everyone.

Near the shuttered ticket counter, a newspaper rack catches his eye. Filled with gray copies of  _Gazeta Krakówska_ , he expects to find a date of 3 January 2018 or 4 January 2018.

It reads 4 November 2016, less than a month after Death Valley.

Although he can't begin to guess the implications, he knows where to look for answers. It's not Europe.

He knows of a small international airport in Rzeszów with hangars for private planes. If he's lucky, there'll be a small jet and enough useable fuel to fly to SHIELD's forward operating base in Ciocăneşti – the one with an underground Quinjet hangar.

Then on to New York.

***

In civilian clothing—like black wool trousers, a gray cashmere t-shirt, and expensive white sneakers—Tony looks out of place at the controls of the Quinjet from Leipzig. Meanwhile, Iron Man lays in a crumpled pile in the cargo hold.

The dark, white-tipped waves of the Atlantic Ocean raging below, Steve wonders aloud, "Did you know?"

 _About them being okay in Berlin_.

For once, Tony doesn't play it off, or come up with a too-quick retort. Tony even looks away from the windshield to meet Steve's eyes, when he says, "No. If I had, you would've. Good enough?"

Steve accepts that with a nod: good enough.

That leaves Maria and Eicher—both of them knew, for absolute sure—and Rhodes. He'd like to think Rhodey hadn't known, but he knows better. "And Rhodey?"

From the quick crunch of Tony's brow, the averted gaze, and the newfound interest in the cockpit controls, it seems Tony just realized:  _yep_. _Rhodey knew_.

Tony sighs out a "well, fuck."

It could be that Rhodes, Maria, Eicher, and everyone else are all dead and none of it matters. It could be that this isn't their world—but he and Tony never see their world again. It could be a lot of different things, and maybe that's why he's not angry, not right now. If home exists, and if he ever sees that home again, only then – and  _then_ …

 _Then_.

He'll never forgive them for the past three months.

A piece of Steve's armrest crumbles in his right hand. Less than bothered, he drops the splintered plastic to the metal floor and ignores Tony's eyes combing over him.

"That one piece you just broke costs $5,010.32."

Steve looks up to the ceiling, thinks  _one-two-three_ , and hooks onto a piece of his old self. "It does  _not_."

"Expect a bill."

Steve doesn't have a quick-enough reply. He lets it go, hoping that Tony does, too.

Tony does, and Steve thinks  _thank you_ at him.

Below, waves crest and fold, until the jet passes through a thick, opaque layer of gray clouds. Droplets of water smear across the windshield. Radar stays clear; comms stay silent. A confused alarm squawks, until Tony switches it off.

They have hours to go, until they reach the eastern seaboard of the United States and discover what's left of home.

The urgency of arriving in this catastrophic crisis has dulled into a new normal. With it, time to think turns to time to form piles of questions.

Such as: "How did you, Sam, Bucky, and Rhodes get to the base so fast?"

Steve can't figure out how they did.  _Especially_  Bucky.

Tony returns to form, tried and true. "You call twenty-six hours 'fast'? Remind me to never order pizza from you."

Steve's proud of himself for holding back an eye roll  _and_ a sigh  _and_ a crummy comment. Progress. "Seriously, Tony."

A strong crosswind rattles the jet, its airframe creaking. Despite that, Tony dares to spare Steve a lingering glance – one that Steve quickly interprets as  _uh, not fucking with you_.

"We were only there for—an hour, hour and a half," Steve protests. Maybe he's underestimating – but not by  _twenty-five hours_.

"Well, your boyfriend was in the hospital until about two in the afternoon, the day you guys left for there. Wilson and I left Berlin at 5 the next morning. You tell me."

Steve ignores the "boyfriend" comment, instead of reacting and ensuring that Tony knows it somewhat rankles. More importantly, Steve latches onto something that Tony's either missed or isn't saying: "You didn't come with Bucky and Rhodes?"

Tony's eyes don't roll at Steve, but they  _do_ roll from the hull, up to the ceiling, down the other hull, then down to Tony's lap – chasing unvoiced thoughts.

Steve figures it took Tony and Sam two,  _maybe_ three hours to fly to and find the base. Tony can push his suit to all sorts of Machs; Sam's limited. Bucky and Rhodes would've had the same limitation, plus Bucky being completely down-and-out from that fight in Berlin.

So. Given that. "How long were  _you_ in the building?" Steve asks.

Tony's eyebrows quirk up. "Fifty minutes, tops. But someone decided to lodge his shield into what had to have been an active temporal anomaly thingy, which most likely damaged that thingy's shielding and let loose a whole caboodle of gravitational waves that fucked over a couple of us. So. To answer your question: who knows?"

Steve only followed part of that. Something something about throwing his shield at that machine. Somebody else must have tried to blow it up, given the lack of a floor, char on his discarded shirt, and healed singes on his face; Steve doesn't nail Tony with that.

Otherwise, while Tony says he doesn't know how long, Steve doesn't have to connect the dots for Tony. Bucky being there means Tony and Sam had been there for a while. Bucky being there means that Steve—and Natasha and Sharon—had been there far longer.

HYDRA's got another terrifying project in the works. They can mess with time, they can mess with versions of their people, and now they can mess with entire worlds.

A vacant, dim feeling calms his nerves, soothes his muscles, and stitches little weights to his eyes. It's what SNAFU feels like, in the flesh, exactly as it had during the War.

"I should've stayed in art school," Steve mentions, only  _somewhat_ meaning it.

Tony doesn't forego the opportunity: "And you'd be the happiest little tree you could be."

Bob Ross:  _Let's build a happy little cloud. Let's build some happy little trees. Fall like a little waterfall._

"I get that reference."

***

A year ago, Ciocăneşti had been the second place in time that Fury waited him out and surprised the everliving fuck out of him. All things said, he'd been incredibly naïve to have ever let himself hope for a third.

The power off, the rows of fluorescent lights inside the terminal are dark. The brown leather chairs are worse for wear than the last time he'd seen them, their cracks now more like crevices. The scratched, dented brown wood desk still hosts a black phone, old monitor, silver ding bell, and an  _inel pentru serviciu_ sign.

Barnes walks around the desk and pushes open the brown door. The scuffed, golden door knob clatters to the floor.

Inside a small room, Barnes digs the fingers of his left hand into a miniscule gap between two shit green walls, then pulls. The wall scrapes along a hidden motorized track, sliding into a pocket door compartment. He opens it enough to give his body room to slip through into a dark black stairwell.

Barnes flips on his flashlight and starts down the steps, right hand brushing the top of a handrail. The hangar is at the bottom, fifty or so steps down. As far as he had seen in 2016, it only houses two jets, and he'd taken one of them to a regional airport outside the City in October of that year.

Each step spikes a dull, achy pain through his left leg, and he foolishly hopes that at least one jet is down here – and that it's still operational and fueled. He doesn't want to climb back up.

As he descends, the air perceptibly dries and cools. Though the stairwell and the hangar are encased in clean metal and new concrete, the smell of earthy moisture is still permeating. He hates it.

At the bottom, Barnes shines his light through the cavernous expanse of the hangar. It's empty, except for one, gleaming black jet.

He doesn't let himself feel relief. A lot still needs to go right.

He limps across the hangar and ducks under the jet's belly. The fuel line and electrical couplings are attached, and he checks to ensure they're tight. Although they are, he sees a worrying amount of corrosion, especially around the fuel coupling.

He won't know until he gets inside. Barnes walks to the back of the jet, launches himself up to the jet's roof, and yanks open the access hatch.

He drops down into a perfectly intact jet. The jumpseats are clean, the nets empty. For his peace of mind, he checks and finds that the weapon racks are full.

In the cockpit, he sits in the pilot's seat and powers on the flight management system. Buttons light up, gauges reset themselves, and a beautiful hum  _purrs_  from the underbelly. The fuel gauge indicates "full." The electrical panel flashes and then holds green.

This might work.

Barnes goes for broke and powers up the engines. He hears them smoothly  _whir_ , two wonderful Rolls-Royce marvels of engineering, while year-old fuel still has enough potency to create electrical spark and combustion.

It can fly.

A lot  _still_  has to go right. For one, the base's hydraulic lift and hangar door have to work. The upside is that their controls are wired into the jet through the electrical coupling in the underbelly – designed to ensure the jet can still fly if the base is compromised.

The downside is that it all still relies on the base's equipment—like the hangar access door—to be operational.

Breath held, Barnes presses a quick combination of buttons on the flight panel – and can't help a wide smile when dim light, dirt, and even some snow spills into the hangar. He leans forward and peers up through the windshield.

The hangar door above is wide open.

Next, and this part isn't so important, he sends a command for the jet's pad to raise.

_Error._

He tries again and receives another  _error_.

Good thing Quinjets are built for vertical take-off.

From the cockpit, Barnes disengages the fuel line and electrical coupling, then overrides the magnetic skid-lock. Fully separated from the base, Barnes takes off vertically, knowing that one small mistake could send the jet careening into a wall and crashing back into the hangar.

He keeps it steady and uses the jet's roof camera to line up with the hangar door. It only takes a few seconds to slip through like a glove, while the instruments flash red and a female voice warns  _"terrain, terrain_."

The jet ascends into clear, gray skies, the setting sun burning along the horizon. This time, he lets himself enjoy the relief. Head tilted back, he takes a deep, clarifying breath and lets it back out, recalibrating himself.

That's it.

Eyes back on the flight controls, Barnes focuses on getting to the City.

At Mach 3, it should be a paltry two-hour flight. Barnes has had easier ones. While he remembers what it was like before flight management became automated, this five-year-old Quinjet doesn't.

Every five or so minutes, the jet cycles through its bearing measurement systems, uselessly attempting to link into something, anything transmitting from the ground. A VOR. A reverse RDF antenna. An NDB. A DME. But the Earth is silent, without the barest whisper back.

With the bearing measurement systems so quiet, it's no surprise that navaids and satellites, like ACARS and GPS, aren't operational. The GNSS is down, which, while not catastrophic, means the flight computer's INS velocity calculations are increasingly incorrect. Worse, none of the RNAV systems are operational.

Red error messages persistently flash on the flight control panel, while audible alarms sound every ten minutes. They're annoying more than anything else.

He's not flying blind, but, midway over the Atlantic with nothing but ocean for visual guidance, he's likely not flying to New York. He's okay settling for close.

Radar  _does_  work, although it happens to show abso-fucking-lutely nothing in the air. The U.S. alone averages 5,000 commercial flights in the air at any given moment – that's not counting military or private flights.

To burn time, despite everything he's seen over nearly three days, despite absolutely no sign of active ground communication systems, Barnes clicks through mute radio frequency after frequency.

He hasn't thought about what he'll do, if the entire world is as empty as Poland and Romania. Or what he'll do, if he can't find a way back.

He thinks of the last few moments on the mezzanine, with Steve and the pulsing light. He remembers pushing Steve into the stairwell, his one and only thought being to get Steve away from it. He remembers a red-and-gold blur—Stark—at the same time the light swelled. Then, immediately after, waking up alone, the machine nowhere to be found, no one anywhere to be found.

He focuses on the last few seconds: the blur, the swelling light, Steve meters away. He wonders if – and no. It wouldn't have gotten that far. It wouldn't have gotten to Steve.

But. The more he considers what he knows—the other Steve, the other him—and what he's seen here, the more he wonders if this is his world at all. Maybe they're all in the real world, trying to figure this out as much as he is.

That's a dull hope. He knows better than to have it.

At first a dark shadow, the United States mainland comes into view. Seconds later, the shadow becomes tiny, cloud-covered islands, a precursor to the effervescent blue coast of the eastern seaboard.

He's gone back in time in just two hours: while sunset at 1700 in Romania, it's 1000 or so on the East Coast. Unlike Europe, the roads here aren't empty, but they're entirely as stagnant.

Barnes decreases speed, lowers altitude from 35,000 to 13,000 feet, and alters course northerly. He suspects he drifted south and ended up near the Carolinas.

Hugging the coast, Barnes glances at the land but can't stand to look at vehicle-jammed roads, weather-uprooted highways, burned and disaster-destroyed houses, unkept beaches eroded by waves and time, and overgrown vegetation.

A year has taken its toll.

He steels himself for what the City will be like.

He can't breathe when he sees it.

Whatever happened occurred globally. In Eastern Europe, likely around 0300. On the East Coast of the United States, likely around 2100, when people were awake, traffic swarmed the streets, trains ran nonstop, and planes took off and prepared to land.

Vehicles wrecked. Trains derailed. Subway cars crashed onto streets. Buses overturned. Main thoroughfares flooded.

A year later, without human interference, streets have become rivers, and those still dry are quickly on their way to becoming grassy, weed-infested meadows.

From Brooklyn to Manhattan to Queens to the Bronx, some buildings are piles of gray rubble and others gutted, burnt remnants. Not all of them, but enough of them. The hundreds still standing speak of the passage of unattended time, with empty, vine-ridden window frames, facades stripped away to reveal faded Tyvec, and the rapid swell of nature overtaking hundreds of years of mankind's work.

The ever-bustling, never-stop-moving City that never sleeps stands vacant.

Empty.

Still.

Alone.

***

"Well, at least the Tower's still here."

Steve glances at Tony, too tired to parse grief from amusement. He chooses not to reply, no idea what he'd say.

As Tony approaches the Tower's main entrance, Steve stays put, thinking  _this is my City, this is home._

The City's silence boors under his skin, ripping through him from the inside out. This—all of this, whatever this is—hadn't seemed all the way real until now.

"Door's broken. Someone's been here," Tony announces. "Wonder who."

Steve looks Tony's way. He's right: one of the doors is completely off its hinges, but, more importantly, it's intentionally leaned against the doorframe, ajar enough for it to not fall over. Steve knows better than to let his hopes up.

Inside, without a single command from Tony, the lobby lights already illuminate the vaulted ceiling, unattended reception desk, granite hallways, and elevator bank.

"Behold: the infinite glory of my arc reactor tech.  _Power_. Self-sustaining."

Any other day, Steve would roll his eyes and avoid inflating Tony's head any bigger. But it's  _electricity_. "This is incredible, Tony."

"Made it in a cave." Tony shuffles to the elevator bank and taps an "up" arrow. The button even lights up, and the elevator car even calls. "He's here. You know that, right?"

"Someone is," Steve replies, again with that whole "not hoping" thing.

The car comes, and the doors open. Together, they step in, and Tony presses the button for Floor 93.

That's not any lab, cafeteria, or floor Steve knows. "What's on 93?"

"A creature of habit. You just wait and see."

Floor 93 is towers of books by the TV and empty Pepsi cans scattered on the floor. A musk of hair cream, coffee, and tobacco hanging in the air. Bags of potato chips and Doritos, jars of Nutella and peanut butter, and cans of soup cluttering the counter.

Steve looks to Tony, an unspoken "are you seeing this?" between them. They share something like a smile.

"Don't say—"

"Told you so," Tony interrupts.

"—it. Bucky!"

Almost immediately, Steve knows that Bucky isn't in the suite. Except for the languid purr of the building's mechanicals, this floor is noiseless.

"He's not in here."

"Could be anywhere in the building. Hey, JAR—" Tony cuts himself off with a frustrated sigh. "Stay here. I can do a building-wide announcement from 98."

Tony leaves, and Steve goes into the kitchen. A bag of plain, ruffle potato chips is clipped shut. Steve opens it and tastes one of the relatively fresh chips. The bag hasn't been open for long, which probably means that Bucky has been here in the last day or so.

Steve ventures back into the living room and notes five stacks of books on the floor. It's a lot for a few days. He reaches down and picks up one of a handful of soda cans; the dark liquid on the lip is coagulated but not completely dry.

Near the TV, dozens of DVD cases and discs litter the floor.  _Armageddon, National Treasure, Independence Day, The Kid with a Bike, Star Trek,_ all the  _Harry Potter_ movies,  _Stargate Atlantis_ , and  _ER_  round out the eclectic pile. Again, it seems like a lot for a few days.

Steve wonders if it's only been a few days for Bucky. If maybe, somehow, it's been longer.

"Attention, attention: will all homeless grifters living in my building make their way to Floor 93. Please, all homeless grifters, go to Floor 93. Your boyfriend's there waiting. And you owe me a new door."

Steve sighs. Of all the people to be stranded with at the end of the world, Tony might not have been his top choice. "Real nice, Tony."

While waiting, Steve proceeds into the bedroom. Although the bed is made, the white comforter and rows of pillows are rumpled and lived in. A pile of expensive, obnoxious clothing tags—Prada, Burberry, Versace, Steve notes with raised eyebrows—and a holstered handgun occupy the top of a dresser, while a black tac vest hangs off the back of a chair.

Steve examines the vest and finds exactly what he'd morbidly hoped: swaths of blood and two bullet holes. On the chair's seat, a standard-issue black comm piece has been carefully wrapped around two combat knives, as if they belong to someone who knows he's not going to need them anytime soon.

More than convinced, Steve knows Bucky has been here and recently. He turns back toward the living room and gazes toward the closed elevator doors.

Bucky would've been here already.

He's not here now.

_Ding._

Steve catches his breath. More guilty than he should be, he darts out of the bedroom and skids to a stop at the sofa, placing one casual hand on its top and the other real smoothly on his hip.

It doesn't matter if the world is empty. It doesn't matter that this might be home or might not be home. None of that matters, not when Bucky is here, alive, himself, and heal—

Tony steps out of the elevator car, alone. "Well? Is he here?"

Steve's hand slides off his hip and hangs limp at his side.

"No," Tony answers himself.

Steve turns and looks out the floor-to-ceiling window that spans the once-was glistening, polished skyline of eastern Manhattan. Past the East River, beyond the sea of Brooklyn's stout, brick buildings, Steve looks all the way to a black-and-white moment in time when a handful of boys were still the people they were always supposed to be.

"I think I know where," Steve says. "I'll be back."

Nonplussed, Tony can't resist himself. "When you find him, make sure you let him know that he owes me a door. Not kidding."

"I'll add it to the list."

***

Along the long, planked dock at Sheepshead Bay, cornflower blue handrails flake and peel, grinding down to bare, blackened wood. Embellished, curved light poles rust, their lightbulbs already cracked and broken.

A lot is missing. Voices. Horns. People. Boats. A handful of brothers and a person as close to a father as Steve had ever known.

Not the birds, though. Flocks of gulls circle the water, diving and squawking, while the rest hop further and further down the dock, until they launch into flight over the calm water of the Hudson.

The calls of the gulls join the hollow echoes of his footsteps and the faint slapping of water against the dock. The world stretches as far as those three sounds.

Steve looks across the expanse of the Bay, all the way to Coney Island and Manhattan Beach, then down across to Plumb Beach, past collapsed boat slips, capsized mini-yachts, shattered store fronts, and battered vacation homes.

Nobody.

No fishing pole. No cigarette smoke swirling in the air. No sign that anyone has been here since…since whatever happened.

No Bucky.

It was a long shot, Steve tells himself. This whole thing is a long shot.

Finding Bucky.

Finding home.

Stopping HYDRA.

All he has to go on is a potato chip and a fucking soda can.

With nary a glance backward, Steve leaves Sheepshead and tears down the streets. At first a brisk walk, he launches into a dead-heat sprint down Ocean Avenue, counting down the avenues in reverse alphabetical, from Z to R in a handful of minutes.

Past Quentin, across Kings Highway, then back to the avenue alphabet and past Brooklyn College.

The alphabet ends, turning into streets named Farragut, Foster, Newkirk, Ditmas.

Steve has no idea where he's going or why he's going but he goes and goes, dodging downed trees, pieces of roofs, errant vehicles, collapsed asphalt, and flooded dips in the street.

Church leads to Caton to Crooke and Woodruff and Parkside and then –

Steve jogs to a halt next to a McDonald's and a laundromat.

Up ahead, Prospect Park's budding branches build a canopy over cracked concrete paths, while the rippling water of the lake glitters under the mellow sun.

He hasn't been here for years. Decades.

The barest hint of smoky menthol carries on the slight breeze.

Steve's stomach flips.

He trots toward the smoke, heart racing faster and thumping harder, his brain circling an impossible possibility that  _it's not him it can't be what if it is what if it's not_. Adrenaline and hope and anticipation go straight to his legs, and they propel him further and faster.

He beats along a concrete path, surrounded by bud-tipped branches, following a too-familiar waterline, with thoughts of pigskin football and beehives swirling through his mind. This Park, this shitty, dangerous Park, was a backbone of their childhood.

The smell of smoke thickens into something undeniable, as Steve hears the unmistakable sound of plastic fishing line running over the gears of a reel.

_Plop!_

Through a thicket of trees, Steve crunches over hard ground, and goes no further.

Cigarette dangling from his lips, a fishing pole in his hands, Bucky's shoulders tense. He jerks his head Steve's way, face crumpling into naked astonishment.

The cigarette drops to the ground a second before the fishing pole.

Steve blinks and then blinks again, not trusting his eyes. It can't be. Can't be.

Bucky runs toward Steve and doesn't slow down the closer he gets. He hits Steve at damn near full speed, arms wrapping around him in a tight, inescapable hug. His fingers scrape against the skin of Steve's back as they bunch the fabric of his shirt.

"You – Christ" is all Bucky has to say, nothing cool and nothing calm.

Steve catches up to the moment: it's  _Bucky_.

Steve reciprocates the hug, equally as intense, and revels in the relief that  _Bucky is right here_. Words catch in his throat.

"What the hell took you so long?"

Steve would think Bucky was kidding, if not for the flare of desperation in his tone.

"It's only been three days," Steve tries, even though he knows that he knows – it's somehow been longer. A couple weeks, maybe.

Bucky draws back, his hands still clutching Steve's arms. The look on his face is intense disbelief, while his eyes search Steve for an answer to a clearly articulated question of  _are you fucking with me?_

Steve answers with an affirmative tilt of his head. Maybe it's –

"Try three months."

 _Three months_  hits as good as a wrecking ball, Hannah Louisiana and all. Unable to wrap his head around the number, he doesn't believe it.

Except: the inside of Bucky's right wrist is scarred white, the radial artery healed. Likewise, the incision scar on his neck blends in with his skin, almost invisible; three days ago, it had been an angry red line punctuated by black sutures. His voice is strong and smooth rather than crackly and broken.

Without asking for permission, Steve pulls up Bucky's dark green t-shirt and sees a jagged pearl scar on his abdomen, the skin around it healthy.

All Steve can scrape out is, "By yourself."

Bucky bats Steve's hand away, a half-smile pulling at his lips. "You done?"

Steve makes eye contact. "By yourself."

"And you?" Bucky asks.

"Tony's here. So far, only us." Steve thinks to ask, to wonder – three months is a hell of a lot more data than three days. "Have you seen anyone else?"

Against all odds, Bucky nods, and Steve's hopes soar high – until Bucky explains.

"Two months ago, I saw a Russian military jet headed north. I was in Kazakhstan. I couldn't find where it went. I stayed for two weeks and never saw anything else."

Back at the Tower, it's almost verbatim what Bucky tells Tony.

"And you have no idea where it was going?" Tony asks, body language clearly relaying that Tony doesn't buy it.

Steve tenses, his stress level incrementally rising. He can't mediate them. If it comes down to choosing one or the other, there's no question, no doubt, no choice.

"Nope," Bucky lies.

Steve lets it go – for now. Whatever reason Bucky has for lying about it, Steve trusts it's a good one – and calling him out on it here will only stoke the tension.

"Okay. Sure. That all?" Tony says.

Bucky nods. "That's it. No one and nothing else. But they're here somewhere."

"It's a place to start scanning, at least," Steve offers. "Better than nothing."

Tony scoffs. "Scanning with what?  _If_ I get satellites back online,  _maybe_."

Abruptly, Bucky asks, "Why are you here?"

Steve looks to Tony, and Tony looks to Steve, both of them dumbstruck.

As always, Tony recovers quickly, or at least thinks he does. "Forty-two."

Bucky looks to Steve, and Steve looks to Bucky, and, for the record, that leaves Steve as the only one completely and totally confused by the entire exchange.

Bucky briefly closes his eyes and shakes his head, less frustrated than inexplicably impatient. "Is this a SAR, or a we're-all-screwed-together type of thing?"

"Oh!" Tony snaps his fingers and claps his hands. "I get it. The second one."

Thinking back, the last thing Steve remembers clearly seeing was Bucky's left arm launch him into the stairwell, then Bucky not quite falling, not quite stumbling into the blue light. Less than a second later, Tony blasted around the machine, his suit scraping the door frame, hands hitting Steve's chest a blink after the light swelled over him.

Two, three seconds apart, at the most. Steve doesn't know how that translates into three months, but he understands why Bucky thought they were here to take him home.

"We got hit right after you, Buck," Steve gently explains, at nearly the same time Tony snarks, "Not that we wouldn't have tried to rescue you."

Disappointment flares on Bucky's face, then vanishes into a pretense of neutrality and sarcasm. "Yeah, I'm sure. So…"

Bucky searches the air with his eyes, gears spinning. It's almost as if Steve can read his mind:  _what the hell happened?_

Steve answers the unasked question. "We don't know."

Steve doesn't expect Bucky's quaking deep breath – because he knows it means that he's gearing up to say something he doesn't want to say.

"I might."

Alarmed by how Tony will react to that, Steve moves between the two, so not wanting to do this today.

The two gawk at him.

"Cap." Tony waits until Steve gives him his attention. "Relax. I know he's de-hydrated. B, shoot."

"Oh, my god," Bucky sighs. "I can't believe you said that."

It's the biggest mistake, or so says the Cheshire cat grin living on Tony's face – because now he knows that it rankles. It's Tony's special brand of acidic cordiality, energy not often expended on just anybody.

They're okay with each other, Steve realizes. Okay enough, at least.

Tony spins his hand, saying to move it along. "Do tell."

"The date – it's too coincidental," Bucky says, referring to November 4, 2016. "So, I went to Death Valley."

That's not the gut punch.

"And I found Sam's body."

***

Displayed on a high-definition, holographic screen, a digital video shows a decomposed, combat-clothed body sprawled back-flat on a pitted floor. Surrounded by old blood splatter, the camera focuses on a set of dog tags: Wilson, Samuel T.

He'd recorded this months ago, and his stomach twists the same way now as it had then. People die, no one's guaranteed, the world isn't nice, shit doesn't always work out – everything he knows.

He'd taken Sam's body as close to home as Barnes could find and buried it. Before he'd lost that jet in Mexico, if he'd stood still inside of it, closed his eyes and breathed, he could still smell the inescapable stench of death.

"That's the room," Steve states.

Barnes looks his way and doesn't miss that Steve has taken several steps away from the screen. If someone showed him video of the cosmodrome, Barnes wouldn't be as nice about it.

"Yeah." Barnes stops the video before it shows a massive blood stain. "Before I left last year, I read the AAR. HYDRA stormed the room, Sam and Natasha killed them, then Sam left with me. Natasha stayed with Steve, until Hill's team came."

Impatiently, Stark nods through the narrative. "Spot on. What's your point?"

With anyone else,  _anyone_ , Barnes would snap, "It's pretty fucking obvious." He bites his tongue long enough for Steve to say it for him.

"Really, Tony?" Steve challenges. "It's pretty damned obvious."

Meaning: Sam never left that room. Sam died there. The other Steve and the other version of Barnes himself: they'd come from that moment in that room, their future irrevocably changed.

"Okay. Let me get this straight. HYDRA magically went back in time to 2016 to grab you two, then magically ended the entire world, all without magically affecting  _our world_. Why not any time before 2011 – they already had you dead to rights," Tony points to Barnes, "and could've grabbed you from the Arctic." Stark points to Steve.

It's not that Stark isn't worldly, hasn't been affected by HYDRA, or hasn't witnessed horrendous things. It's that he hasn't lived inside of that world to know what it is they do.

With a worrying level of apathy, Steve replies, "They put a lot of effort into Death Valley. Why bother doing it again?"

" _Why bother doing it_ ," Tony snappishly argues. "Find a new theory. Yours sucks."

Barnes barely hears him.

Hearing Steve admit that feels like the last morning in Brazil. Barnes hangs his head and tries to kick the broiling anger and guilt, but he's stuck on wondering how many people HYDRA murdered to break Steve. How many Steve killed, to get to the point where Steve barely hesitated to kill him.

And he wonders what HYDRA had done to the other Steve, to make seven dead civilians in Berlin a possibility. Such a dumb question: Barnes knows first-hand.

"Barnes. You still here?"

Barnes glances at Stark, buries his wonder, and steamrolls. "Death Valley was about Steve and maybe Natasha. I don't think it was about me."

He doesn't dare tell them HYDRA classified him as end-of-life. That HYDRA only bothered to try to bring him back to life in that hospital in 2016 for one reason – and it wasn't so they could recreate the dream of their Winter Soldier.

Steve makes an unintelligible noise and quickly turns away, arms wrapped so tightly around his chest that Barnes can see skin through Steve's too-tight shirt.

Stark steps forward, arms crossed as tightly. "Are you saying – there's a Romanoff running around who thinks she works for HYDRA?"

KGB, more likely, but whatever. Same difference. "It's a possibility."

Skepticism washes over Stark's face. "Same argument applies."

Steve doesn't turn back around, and, though his voice is still apathetic, Barnes hears a near-imperceptible shakiness. "They'd know everything about post-Insight SHIELD. It explains things."

Barnes doesn't exactly know what Steve is referring to—probably that whole brainwashing their agents and crashing their missions thing—and mostly doesn't care. On his end, he's had a lot of time to do nothing except mull over the facts and re-run 2016 through his head. It explains a couple things from then, too. Not everything, but some things.

Stark walks to a half-circle bank of monitors, towers, and racks, arms still crossed, body tense. Likewise, Steve is seemingly done talking, pulled away into his own world. They both need time to process through this and find their own conclusions.

Fine.

"Okay," Barnes says, "I'll be around."

He's at the door's threshold, when Stark announces, "I think you're fucking loop-de-do crazy about that. But. Fury's been missing since July '17. Not even Hill could make contact."

Barnes grips the doorframe with his right hand. All the air knocks out of his lungs. Fury's dead.

"Are you for fucking real?" Steve hisses.

Fury had been less than altruistic, more than involved in the worst shades of the world, and it's senseless to grieve an inevitable outcome. Everything he knows.

With a phone in Iaşi, a pardon letter in a bank box in Zurich, and a chance where none should have existed, Fury had given him back the world. He owes Fury his life.

Owed.

" _Back o—_ "

Barnes looks over his shoulder.

Steve has Tony by the throat, pinned against a wall of flat screens. Tony's feet hover inches off the ground.

His face bright red, Tony kicks Steve between the legs two, three times – nothing. He palm-strikes and then punches his jaw – nothing. Without a suit, Tony is impotent against Steve.

Barnes doesn't go for something smooth, or something calculated. He doesn't take Steve out with a brutal kick to the knee, or knock him out with a left-handed punch. He plows into him with a strong shoulder and pushes him face-first into a wall of screens.

He expects Steve to spin around, and he steps into the right hook he knows Steve is going to throw – to snap him out of it.

His vision dims into black blots and glints of gold flashes. He blinks until Steve's devastated, appalled face comes into somewhat of a focus.

"Are you done?" Barnes asks.

"I—" Steve shakes his head, and every part of him screams  _I don't know what just happened._ A lot like Brazil.

"I know," Barnes says.

He knows what it's like to pack away a good, clean year and then have all of HYDRA's shit roar back.

In his peripheral, a blur that looks like Tony steps away, hand around his throat, and an echo that sounds like him says, "Get him out of here."

Right.

***

Bucky's right hand around Steve's upper left arm, he leads Steve into the elevator and presses a button. Steve doesn't look to see which floor. Bucky's hand drops, leaving a cold spot on Steve's arm.

Steve dares a glance over and sees Bucky casually leaning in the corner, apparently nonthreatened. He's got that hand wrapped around his forehead, fingers massaging his temples, while his jaw makes a clenched square.

He's pissed, Steve thinks. He swallows a dry lump. "Where are we going?"

"Downstairs."

"I want to go to my room," Steve says.

"What, are you twelve?"

The elevator stops on 81. The gym.

Bucky steps out first, hand intentionally placed on the doors. "C'mon. Blow off some steam."

Steve looks past Bucky and sees the full-floor gym, complete with punching bags and boxing gear. Sometime in 2017, he'd eviscerated every bag in here. If Tony had ever ordered replacements, Steve never bothered to find out.

The elevator's door alarm blares. Bucky raises his eyebrows, at once defiant and expectant.

Steve swears under his breath and gets out. "Happy?"

"Thrilled."

It occurs to him that he hasn't seen Bucky for eight months, and, for three of those, believed him dead. For the last three, unending days, he hadn't known if Bucky was alive, dead, something else, or something worse.

It's only been three hours since Prospect Park. And this is how he's decided to play it – beyond trying to choke Tony during another uncontrollable black out.

Red, ashamed heat burns his cheeks.

Bucky slips a pair of reinforced black punching pads over his hands. "C'mon. Burn it off."

Rather than argue about it, Steve toes off his sneakers and advances with a soft jab. Bucky easily bats it away – but gets thrown visibly off-balance. They all have their moments, Steve thinks.

Steve punches again, purposeful, harder, and connects with the left pad. Although his elbow screams, it doesn't hurt his knuckles the way he'd thought it would.

He picks up speed, easing into a rhythm, syncing steps and movements with Bucky. Stress, worry, and anger weep away, overtaken by focus and cadence. Time dissolves.

Ever the trainer, Bucky throws in notes like, "Straighten your back," "follow-through better," and "step deeper into it." Steve's never second-guessed the guidance and doesn't intend to start today – but he also doesn't intend to tell Bucky that he can't step deeper with his left knee, not without it buckling.

"You gonna ask about Brazil?" Bucky asks.

All of the questions Steve had about Brazil flew by the wayside in October. He can't say they've become a priority since.

Without letting up, the nerves in his right elbow shooting livewires of pain through his wrist and fingers, Steve cocks his head and frowns. "Should've  _done_  this in Brazil."

"We're good?"

Steve flicks his eyes up for a moment. "Always."

They go until Steve splits the right pad into flat foam. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and finds a build-up of sweat. None of this changes what happened upstairs, but, as he exhales a strong, hot breath, he feels grounded enough to face it.

Bucky tosses the pads aside, while Steve cools down with a few jabs at the ceiling-hung punching bag.

Bucky walks up behind the bag and holds it. Up close and standing relatively still, Steve notices that his pupils have grown wide enough to eclipse the blue of his eyes.

Steve aborts a punch. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Keep going."

Steve believes him and does. His right hand turns tingly numb – nerve damage from 2016.

"What happened up there? Why that?" Bucky asks.

It's a fair enough question, and Steve has a fair enough answer. "Insight happened because of SHIELD's secrets.  _You_ happened because of those secrets." Bucky doesn't flinch, and Steve goes on. "If we can't trust each other, then what's the point?"

Bucky makes a wry face. "It's an espionage organization."

Very intentionally, Steve punches the bag hard, ridiculously satisfied when Bucky takes a steadying, off-balance step backwards. "It's the Avengers - something better."

"Okay," Bucky says, perfectly conveying that he thinks Steve is being overly idealistic. Naïve. Gullible.

For many long minutes, Steve only punches, baking his thoughts into each fist and fixating on a routine Bucky taught him in 1942.

He ignores the warning twinge in his knee—it's going to give—but can't ignore the weakness in his right arm. Awkwardly, he punches more with his left, losing his rhythm. But he won't stop: he won't give HYDRA this victory.

Bucky's voice breaks his concentration. "The world doesn't always bend, Steve. Change what you can and leave the rest alone."

"Can't do that."

"Okay, well, your alternative can't be choking people. You're gonna kill somebody."

Steve stops punching, in lieu of pounding the bag and potentially Bucky into dust. "You think I don't know that?"

"I think you haven't accepted that. I've only been saying it since you were, what, fourteen?"

Steve chuffs out a laugh. Only Bucky can wind him down that quickly. "How does that math work out?"

"Fuck if I know."

Steve takes another couple swipes at the bag and wonders. "You really think they have another Natasha?"

Bucky shrugs – not because he's not sure, but because he's not sure of how  _Steve_ willreceive it. "I couldn't find a body. Everything she is for SHIELD, she was better at it for them. You two together on their side is a sweet deal."

Steve almost doesn't catch the omission. He does, though, and he weighs it against what Bucky said earlier. It doesn't make sense.

"Buck. They  _were_ after you in 2016. It was all about you."

Like he'd said in Brazil: Steve doesn't know the ins-and-outs of what Bucky, Natasha, and Sam experienced while searching for him. But he knows what HYDRA had done in Death Valley. It had  _all_ been about Bucky.

Bucky's brow knots and his head shakes with uncertainty, doubt, and a fleck of confusion. "That—Sure. I'm probably wrong. I hope I am."

There's something huge that Bucky isn't saying. Steve tests a hunch, unsure how to say it. "Because of the Red Room."

Stunned. Appalled. Shocked. Outraged. All good words to describe the burgeoning look on Bucky's face.

"She told you?" No sooner does Bucky ask that than does it all turn to some strange medley of irate curiosity. "Or did HYDRA."

Steve has faced down scarier things than Bucky gearing up for an angry tear. All said, Bucky's always been real shit at staying upset.

Before he answers, Steve takes another couple of energy-sapping whacks at the bag - undercut, right hook, left hook, punch… Steve takes a long step to avoid face-planting, as the bag sails across the room, hits the wall, and deflates into a pile of sand.

The silver plates on Bucky's bare left arm shift down, clicking and whirring as they go. He'd turned the hologram off, as if wrecking the bag hadn't been enough of a point to make.

Ice cold, Bucky demands, "Who told you."

Steve glances at the bag, then back to Bucky. "Looks like we're both fucking crazy today."

"Steve."

Arms crossed, Steve stares into Bucky's eyes – pupils black, ringed by a thin line of blue.

Like Steve thought before: Bucky's pretty shit at being angry. All he sees is fear of the thought that HYDRA is out there, spilling every gruesome secret to anyone they can get their hands on.

He's right to fear that. Steve learned more in Death Valley than he'll ever tell – but not about the Red Room, whatever it was.

"Nat did." Fear flips to betrayal; Steve heads off another outburst. "You were  _dead_."

Bucky spits out a derisive laugh. "Good to know."

"She…" It pisses Steve off that he has to explain this, but he does explain it. "We thought Sharon handed you over. Nat blamed herself. And I – regretted how Brazil went."

"So you commiserated over  _that_?" So much disgust and loathing fills that small, insignificant word. It punches as hard as any fist. "None of that makes  _me_  fair game. And  _you_  don't have to know everything. Draw yourself a fucking boundary."

Despite the furor, a thought crosses Steve's mind: Bucky sounds exactly, to the tee, like his old self, when they could rail at each other all day and never miss a single beat of their friendship. There are no egg shells, no doubt, no pulled punches.

"Why does it bother you so much?"

Bucky hesitates, all of those gears spinning again. Plain as day, Steve witnesses the moment he figures something out, tension easing, anger soothing.

"I guess it shouldn't," he answers and, after all that, sounds hollow and distant. The hologram crackles over his arm, flashing on and off at least twice before staying on. "I'm going upstairs."

Plain as day, Steve realizes: he has a concussion from the half-assed punch upstairs.

Steve follows Bucky to the elevator, watches him jab at the button for "93" and miss, then jab at it again. It lights up, and he leans in the corner again, hand over his eyes.

"Is the light bothering you?" Steve asks.

"It's fine."

Bucky says that, but, on 93, the first thing Bucky does is turn off the lights. Steve trails behind him past the sofas, books, DVDs, and Pepsi cans, straight to the second bedroom.

Bucky falls onto the bed, right on top of the covers. He keeps his hand on his head, eyebrows knotted together.

It'd only been one punch.

With a sickening burst of dread, Steve realizes something else. "Is this why you think it wasn't about you? They knew?"

Through splayed fingers, Bucky peers at Steve with half-lidded eyes. "No."

Steve doesn't know if he should believe that or not.

Steve folds half of the bedcovers over Bucky, then lays down on the coverless side, the edges of their bodies touching.

Already half-asleep, Bucky murmurs, "We're too old for this. People are gonna talk."

Steve scoots in closer. He knows it's still okay, when Bucky flops his right arm onto Steve's stomach. "Too late for that. Tony already calls you my boyfriend."

"Oh, good, I can call you 'Dot,'" Bucky replies, voice fading with the lure of sleep. "Can you pet my hair?"

"Buck," Steve warns, if only because neither of them—but particularly Steve—will ever live "Dot" down. "I swear to God."

A soft snore is Bucky's answer.

In this dark room, with Bucky right now safe next to him, Steve can almost forget that they're stranded at the end of the world. That he's still a time bomb, their Fury is likely dead, a version of Natasha could be HYDRA, a version of Steve himself  _is definitely_ HYDRA, Tony might be hurt, and Bucky might be sick beyond the repair of his serum.

Almost is a far cry.

***

The next evening, Steve finds Bucky sitting alone in the Tower's cafeteria. A faint tangy smell of aluminum hangs in the air, overshadowed by the stronger smell of cooked potato, carrot, corn, beef, and, oddly enough, popcorn and coffee.

It's some sort of long-gone-cold stew in a white porcelain bowl, along with an empty, butter-coated bag of Orville Redenbacher.

Bucky glances up from a book, his nose damn near buried in a disposable Starbucks coffee cup. "Hey." He makes a face, introspective and confused, while he chews on the cup's uncovered lid. "Did I kill a bag yesterday?"

Steve slides into the booth across from Bucky. "Just a little. You slept for a whole day."

And recently woke up, by the looks of his messy dry hair, past-five o'clock shadow, and wrinkled gray jacket. Stark Tower may run just fine off the electrical grid, but it still relies on the City for water service, of which there is none.

"What's a day?" Bucky reflects. "How's Stark?"

Steve could use his own coffee cup to chew. He lets his silence answer the question.

He watches Bucky's eyebrows raise, an "oh" half-formed on his lips. "Well, what's a day?"

A longer time than it should be. That's Steve's festering problem, not Bucky's. "How are you?"

A dark blue bruise has come and gone, now a faint green tint along his cheekbone. "Tired of canned food. A hot shower would be fucking amazing. There's hot springs in Oregon, by the way, so long as the jet fuel holds out."

Steve almost laughs: only,  _only_ God damn Bucky.

"They're nice," Bucky says. "Might help your arm and knee."

Bucky never missed a damn thing. That hasn't changed.

Steve makes an ambivalent sound, which, all said, should probably be more enthusiastic: he's sick and tired of cold baths in gritty rivers. And Tony – hasn't attempted that. They both probably smell.

Bucky continues. "Fresh fruit in Mexico. I don't like Florida, but the alligators there seem pretty happy. Little fuckers."

Steve waits for Bucky to get to some sort of point, or even some sort of coherency of ideas, but doesn't care if he does or not. Maybe he wants to tell Bucky to  _just keep talking_.

Something like five days ago, Bucky was dead. Today, he's chewing on a coffee cup and babbling about anything. It's damn near perfect.

"I ran out of jet fuel near Comondú in Mexico – all mountains, cold desert. It was actually kinda nice."

The bronze tinge of his face and right arm tell part of that story. The weary stress lines on his face have faded into a relaxed ease, and he looks a content 30, 31 years old.

"Jet's still there. I drove back here. That was kind of a nightmare, but. I climbed a couple mountains in the Sierra de la Giganta range. Talk about a view."

He's  _happy_ here, Steve realizes – with some relief but mostly trepidation. He's happy  _here._

Bucky's eyebrows pop up. "What? I was fine. I can do everything you can do, only better."

Most any other time, those would be fighting words, a challenge Bucky knows Steve would have trouble ignoring – but he's  _happy here._

Steve bolts out onto a shaky limb. "Are you coming home?"

"You're being awfully optimistic," Bucky replies. "About going home."

Completely unsatisfied with that answer, Steve says, "Tony's here, when he doesn't want to be. He'll make a way back. Are you coming home?"

"Again with that optimism," Bucky retorts. "It's been three months, and you're only here by accident."

That's fair – fair enough that it may spook Steve. He has all the faith in Tony, but. But.

Steve sits back and kicks his legs out, ankles crossed, thinking of a way to get Bucky to God damn  _answer the question._ "What were you going to do?"

Brows lifted, Bucky prompts, "If..."

"No one came."

So much like Natasha, he bites the inside corner of his cheek. "I didn't think it was a possibility. But now? Doesn't look so good."

More than trust, more than faith, he's saying that he never doubted them. After everything— _everything_ —Bucky thought someone would come.

 _He's coming home_ , Steve realizes, not needing Bucky to say those exact words. Not an idealistic want, it's surefire knowledge, something he feels in how the world jolts onto its axis,  _finally_.

Except for that head injury thing. Steve draws in a breath, ready to go there –

Bucky slides out of the seat. "Go talk to Stark. I'm gonna wash up."

Steve lets him go, disappointed, relieved, and anxious, all at once.

But also: tired of running from this.

Steve goes to the elevator and pushes the button for the only floor he knows Tony to be on. Optimism aside, Tony doesn't want to be here, and, so, the only thing he's doing is working on getting home.

He knows Tony, a friend, that well.

_Ding._

"Floor 98," a pleasant female voice declares.

Steve's stomach knots.

The doors roll open.

Steve puts his hand on the frame and tries to summon some modicum of courage. How silly, when he runs into battle fields without batting an eyelash.

"Yeah, so," Tony starts in. "You have to get off the elevator. It's been, what, six years? You should know this by now."

Steve looks at the ceiling and lets out a long, slow breath. Hands stuffed in pockets, he walks to a few feet from where Tony works between a cluster of computers and monitors.

The green and purple bruising around his neck is obvious and the speckled, red blood blisters easy to see. It's all shaped like fingers.

"Took you long enough."

"Ton—"

"No." Tony rolls back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, and looks Steve squarely. "We get back, you get help. That's it."

That hadn't worked out very well the first time. Or the last three times, with counselors he'd shredded and tore at until they'd quit.

As if he'd said that aloud, Tony counters. "I hired some woman Wilson recommended. They went to school together or something, way before '14, way before HYDRA knew him. That good enough?"

It has to be. "Yeah."

Tony doesn't blink, doesn't move, but his eyes search Steve, scouring for the cracks, for the lie. Something he finds must be satisfying, because he drops his hands, spins in his chair, and pulls up a bright, glowing map with a grand swipe of his hand.

"Good. I have some questions. Go get your boyfriend."

***

At the Manhattan bank of the East River, Bucky stands part-pale/part-tan and naked with a fluffy green towel in his hand.

Steve pretends not to look at Bucky's body, but he does, and he thinks of his own words:  _what they've done to him_. Steve drops his eyes, understanding first-hand how unfair it is to see only the HYDRA. They're both more than that.

Steve reaches into his pants pocket, where he still has his wallet. He pulls out a crisp ten dollar bill. In 1944, it would've been worth a lot more, but all things being considered, it'll do.

After Bucky dries off and dresses in new black and gray clothes, tags thrown on the ground, Steve flips the folded bill at him.

Confused, Bucky catches it. "Wh—" The word doesn't get past his lips before Bucky lets out a real laugh. "You remember that. Jesus."

Steve's surprised that Bucky does, to be honest about it. "I figure you can buy yourself something nice."

Bucky holds up the bill between two fingers. "This won't even cover cigarettes."

"That's a bad habit, you know."

"Yeah, I'm real sure it's gonna kill me."

"Probably not," Steve says, intentionally killing the back-and-forth. He turns toward the Tower and nods his head towards it. "Tony's good. He wants to—"

Bucky catches his arm – not aggressive, not panicked. "Hey. Listen."

Steve faces him and waits for Bucky to continue, expecting something life-changing or profound, but he doesn't say a thing. Perplexed, Steve glances back over his shoulder, checks his surroundings, waiting for whatever it is that Bucky is hearing.

"You dumbass.  _Listen_."

The world is absolutely silent, except for the whistle of the wind, the rippling of the river, the trilling of birds swooping in the rays of the early evening sun, the whishing of the grassy weeds, the rustle of withered leaves. Bucky's heart pulses, blood flowing, air rushing through his lungs. Deep inside his arm, a barely-there electronic vibration whispers a faint hum.

Steve can hear it all, while a long-settled disquiet dissolves into peacefulness.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Three months shows.

***

In Tony's lab, Barnes leans against the wall near the elevator doors, not out of fear but laziness. Steve chooses to pace, while Tony barely looks up from his screens.

"We left you in Berlin, barely able to walk. How long were Wilson and I gone?"

He knows the answer for both Tony and Steve, down to the hours. Even for himself, he knows he'd been caught in the loop for six hours that his brain, body, wristwatch, and environment said was only forty minutes.

"Thirty-three hours," Barnes says to Tony, then sharply looks to Steve. "Almost three days."

Nose pinched between two fingers, Tony spins his hand, rich guy talk for "keep it coming."

Meanwhile, Steve keeps his pacing and blinks, wholly unsurprised by the numbers. That's good: Steve and Tony had talked about it, and, best of all, known about it.

Barnes isn't exactly sure what else Tony wants, until he remembers something maybe important. "Banner mentioned something about Selvig's research - that it looked like something Selvig was working on for SHIELD before 2012."

Tony latches onto that. " _That_  would explain the portal by the Spree, and it  _might_ explain us being here, but not the time hopping." His head shakes, eyes searching thin air, a string of seconds before he tilts his head back and forth and makes a face. "Okay, maybe."

Both Steve and Barnes lean a bit forward, waiting for Tony to fill them in.

"Spacetime. General relativity. Depends on what they're doing and how they're doing it. Anywho, doesn't matter," Tony says, all in the space of about two seconds. Verbal whiplash is real. "You've been here three months. What else you got?"

"Tony, leave him alone."

Barnes throws a glare at Steve, then completely ignores him. "I went to the base under Lake Kręta. It's not there. No spillway, no dam, no pylon. Just a lake."

"You had video," Steve argues. "You were there."

Barnes nods and speaks directly to Steve. "I know. Then I went to the Tabernas base. It's filled-in concrete, just like it was in 2016, when I went there looking for you."

That example has a lot of power behind it. From what he understands, it has a lot of history, too.

"We were there three months ago," Steve keeps arguing, but his tone is more upset than dismissive.

First:  _six months_ ago.

Second: Barnes pushes off the wall and casually puts himself between Steve and Tony. He doesn't care if either of them realize it. Tony does, by the way his eyes follow Barnes.

If Steve catches on, he doesn't mention it. He keeps on going: "It was operational. I saw that video, too. I saw... what happened to you."

Uncomfortable with that, Barnes glances at Tony, whose eyes are hard, expression severe, gears grinding.

Tony's already putting it all together, amazingly quick, and he gets there even faster than Barnes expected. "This is a worldwide staging area. They build it here and pop it into our world with their Tesseract tech."

"And it pulls whatever was on our side here," Barnes adds.

It doesn't explain what happened to him in Berlin: he doesn't  _think_ he'd switched worlds and, so maybe, HYDRA knows how to control that part. He'll leave that for Tony and, with all the luck in the world, Banner to figure out.

Tony raises his eyebrows and blows out a breath. "Hell of a way to rebuild."

Barnes doesn't agree with the dismissive disdain he hears. He thinks Tony hasn't caught all the way up.

Steve has. "Work it in reverse, Tony. Maybe they grab your building. Maybe they grab headquarters. Maybe they grab whatever they want, whoever they want, whenever they want, and dump it here. Maybe they—" Steve waves his hand at the windows, gesturing toward the City. "—do this to our world."

Whatever it is that HYDRA has done to this world. However it is that they made it.

As Steve speaks, Barnes watches Tony's face fall, crumpling under the realization of how much damage HYDRA could inflict with this technology. It's not a game changer: it's a world ender.

With all the maturity of his years, Barnes thinks but doesn't say,  _Welcome to my world_. The three month vacation has been nice, sure, but more so a rollercoaster of restless uselessness: knowing what HYDRA is working toward, knowing every passing day is a step closer, and knowing exactly where to go to maybe, just maybe, stop it or get home.

"Do you know where they're going to hit next?" Tony asks/demands. "We can hop a ride."

A lie sits on Barnes' tongue. He could easily say "if I knew that, I wouldn't've been here this long." He could make Tony work to find an answer he might have right now, this minute, today. He can't do that to them.

"Look north of Siberia," he grinds out, "near the Barents Sea."

With a nice and slow nod, Tony rolls back in his chair and spins toward a cluster of screens. "This'll be a while. Go have fun – but bring him back by 10 pm. Curfew, kids."

***

On the ground floor, Barnes and Steve walk out of the building into the dead of night. Behind them, Stark Tower looms as a dark shadow, every window from ground to sky artificially blacked-out. Smart.

Down Church Street, they walk straight down the road, weaving between vehicles, stepping around wide potholes, and crunching through green plants that have taken full advantage of the unattended roadway.

In the cloudy black night, the half-moon and a hundred, hundred stars give the only light, enough to dimly glint off storefront windows and, ahead, the reaching, glass skyscrapers.

On their left, the peeling green barrister for the Chambers Street subway station waits for a stampede of people. It hasn't seen the sign for the Millennium Hilton that crashed through the glass valet canopy, or the lonely flag poles standing watch outside the Westfield World Trade Center mall.

The subway stations are what get him the most. Back home, he can't think of the last time he'd seen a subway without at least one person. In all the places he's gone since ending up here, he likes the remote, quiet ones the best: there, he could pretend.

Here… It's empty, alone, cold. But quiet and peaceful.

He cuts down Fulton. On their right, rusting bikes for sharing with no one; on their left, the overgrown St. Paul's Churchyard. Ahead, a three-car pileup inhabits the Fulton Center's glass lobby. They walk past it into a maze of orange and white construction barriers and partly-collapsed scaffolding.

"I don't know how you did this for three months."

About a month ago, wandering down a street much like this one, he realized: he wasn't looking for faces. He wasn't expecting a handler or a victim to cross his path. He wasn't noticing every single vehicle, let alone classifying every single vehicle into a threat level. He wasn't listening for voices or words or phrases, and he wasn't bracing himself for hidden snipers shooting drug capsules.

HYDRA's out there somewhere, but here, in the streets of his beat-up city, he doesn't worry about that.

He could stay here and die here and be at peace with that – the coward's way. Or, he could maybe, somehow, go home and face it all again – the right way.

Barnes doesn't reveal any of that to Steve. In fact, he doesn't say anything.

They turn onto William Street, as if both of them know exactly where the other is going, and as if it would be anything but the same place. Past Rosella's Pizza and a Downtown Pharmacy, the Mega Millions and Powerball signs blank, and then past a once-was cute plaza but now lacking the perfect manicure of its decorative plants, they both turn left onto Beekman. On the corner, a USPS truck's back door is half-open, and its cardboard packages are mostly decomposed.

"Where else have you gone?" Steve asks.

Back to Death Valley, where nothing had changed except the brutal course of history.

Back to Müggelheimer Damm, a four-kilometer jaunt through a normal forest that deposited him at the southern, tree-lined bank of the Dahme. The installation he'd originally gone looking for was an easy, quick find: three stout concrete walls full of mud and old graffiti, and an impassable, crumbled stairway leading to someplace beneath his feet.

Back to Verlauben, this time without an insane plan to blow it up and burn with HYDRA. Its floors were empty, ransacked, searched, and confiscated - all the work of Fury in 2015.

Back through the Tatra Mountains, as he'd already told them, back again to a place he genuinely, truly, oh please god never wants to see again. The spillway to the lake and its base didn't exist there.

Back to the hot flats of Kazakhstan, to the barren remnants of a Soviet airstrip, munitions factory, and barracks. Like home, nothing was left there, either, until an Il-76MD cargo jet designed for the blistering cold of Siberia soared overhead.

Immediately, he'd known. Immediately, his feet were glued to the ground, the thought of running to his Quinjet and pursuing it never, ever crossing his mind. Going back there wasn't an option.

He really had stayed for two weeks, watching the skies for more, for something to tell him he was wrong, while his gut burned with instinctual knowledge. The jet could've been going to a hundred or more places, but, really, only one.

"You stayed busy," Steve comments. "Chasing that plane?"

So. Steve caught the lie.

"Protecting something?" Steve prods.

It's funny, the way trust and friendship can bottom out. It's funnier, the way he'll always be a shade of HYDRA, even to Steve.

It's fair.

Onto Park Row, a Starbucks on the corner, then to Spruce, a pale of heavy garbage still on the sidewalk, then to the on-ramp.

"Buck."

Barnes turns around and walks backward for a moment. In the near distance, he can make out the skyline – smudged silhouettes of the best City the world once had to offer. He'd grown up watching a lot of those buildings rise, in awe.

"Bucky."

The road to the first bridge tower seems endless. Flanked on both sides by relatively mundane office buildings, it's boring too. Impatient, he walks faster, aiming to cross under the steel girders and suspension wires, to smell the water of the river, to see the shadowed outline of the lamplights dotting the promenade.

"Damn it. Are you going to talk?"

Step after step after step, they finally get there, the river sparkling in the moonlight. The tower looms a little bit ahead, and he has to stop himself from running to get to it.

"Bucky, I swear to God."

The river smells like fish and fresh air, without the familiar taint of gasoline, diesel, or exhaust. He fills his lungs with it, then ruins it all with a fresh lit cigarette to calm his nerves. Nicotine doesn't do shit for his body, but the memory of it does.

Under the watchful gaze of the Brooklyn Bridge's tower, Barnes hops onto a steel girder, walks confidently across it, steps over the suspension wires, and stands on the edge of the bridge. The dark, deep water of the East River churns below him.

"If you fall in, you can forget—" Steve sighs away his thought. That's telling. "Fine."

Steve follows Barnes' path and joins him on the wrong side of the bridge. It's probably not a great time to tell Steve that, about a month ago, he'd scaled one of the bridge's tower, all the long way to the tippy top. It'd been a hell of a sunset.

"Bucky. The plane."

Before the universe changed its mind about what to do with him, he'd hung onto the idea of making it back:  _home_. Brooklyn. Here. The place that plane went had stolen it all away.

Barnes blows out a cloud of smoke and drops his smoking hand. "I can't go back there."

With a blink, all the muscles in Steve's face relax, and his eyes widen enough to tell Barnes that he somehow picked up a context Barnes hadn't meant to communicate. "The cosmodrome."

He doesn't know if he's angry about how Steve possibly knows about that place, or resigned that Steve pretty much knows everything; so, he lets it go.

"I don't know for sure. And I don't want to know. I'll stay here; I don't care."

Steve sucks in a breath and lets it back out. "Tony can't suit up without JARVIS."

A pang of claustrophobia squeezes around him, and all he wants to do is scream  _don't put that on me!_  "If I wasn't here? What would you have done, then?"

Showing an ounce of his own anger, Steve pointedly replies, "You  _are_  here.  _We're_  here. He can barely aim a gun."

Barnes doesn't have a decent answer for that. He has a shitty one, and he doesn't say it.

"Look," Steve relents, "you don't even know if that's where HYDRA is."

In the dark, Steve probably can't see the quick pop of his eyebrows, or his petulant eye roll. Barnes flicks the butt of his cigarette into the river, orange embers fading long before it hits the water.

It's mostly true: Barnes doesn't know for absolute certain. Logic told him that Stark Tower would've been on HYDRA's hit list, and, so, he'd parked the jet in Jersey and surveilled the Tower for three weeks. Logic told him a lot of things about this world, and not much of it had held true. His instincts, though, tell him: HYDRA's on that island in the Barents.

Part placating, part opportunistic, Steve offers, "C'mon. I'll bet you my ten dollars back that they're not going to be there. SHIELD knows about it. They'd be stupid to try anything there."

Barnes leans back against the suspension wires and stretches his eyes up the side of the stone tower. Like the river, it has a scent, too: like wet gravel on a cold day, like breathing in the particles of a hundred years of time, decades living within the old stone.

"I went back to our old place," he mentions. "That guy you talked about really fucked it up."

He sees Steve's smile, teeth white. "I don't get how the future ended up with  _that_ but not flying cars."

Barnes almost goes down a bad path with that—something about Howard maybe getting to those, if someone hadn't murdered him.

Barnes shakes it off. "I don't know. Coffee makers are nice. Refrigerators've come a long way. The EU's nice. Podcasts. Cell phones."

A mist of rain blows up from the river. Thunder cries in the distance. That's that.

Wearing an amused grin, Steve looks at him. "Let's blouse. They say Brooklyn at night is pretty dangerous."

As Barnes hops over the wires and onto the asphalt road, he tells Steve that no one ever,  _ever_ said "let's blouse."

"Tell it to Sweeney," Steve replies.

Try as he might to pull old American slang out of thin air, he can mostly think of strange Russian slang. From a fuzzy memory—he must've only been eight or nine, and he'd said it to Becca, then got his ass beat—he remembers only one. Even better, it works for the situation. "Close your head, Cap."

Steve laughs and throws an arm around Barnes' neck, like Bucky used to do to Steve. He doesn't mind it. For the past month, give or take, he's felt closer to Bucky than ever. It feels right.

"I missed you," Steve says. "Come home."

There's no "we'll see" or "it depends" or "maybe" with Steve. It's all or nothing, and, if it's nothing, you'd better have an exit plan ready to go real fucking quick. Barnes splits down the middle and hides behind: "You and Sharon, huh?"

Steve's arm falls to the side, and his energy perceptibly shifts. "Not really. She won't— Forget about it."

Yeah. Barnes gets it. "You forgiven yourself yet?"

For a long moment, the only sounds are their footsteps against the roadway and an errant howl from some sort of urban animal.

"No," Steve admits. "I know  _you_  haven't."

"And I ran away," Barnes says, a moment before he thinks twice about it. "Give her time and space. Be there when she needs you to be. At some point, she will."

"I know. I just— I forgive her. Not that there's anything  _to_  forgive."

"And I forgive you. Not that there's anything to forgive," Barnes points out, knowing that Steve will connect the dots.

Steve nods and nods, hands hidden in the pockets of his—

"Are you wearing my jacket?" Barnes asks. He  _is_. It's the gray cashmere/wool one from some place on 5th Avenue.

"You stole it."

Not the point. Barnes warns, "Don't rip it with your massive fucking shoulders."

"Whatever."

"I mean it. I don't remember where I got it."

The moonlight hits Steve right as Steve rolls his eyes. Jerkbag.

For a while, they walk in easy silence, their steps not fast but not slow. A stroll, almost.

After some of that while, Steve asks, "Did you and Sharon talk a lot?"

"We  _did not_  talk. At all."

"Heard she was mean."

Stark's big mouth strikes again.

"She's going through a rough time," Barnes clarifies. "Think me in Kraków in '15."

"No, I know," Steve quickly says. "Before…" Steve waves a hand. "…all that happened, she wanted you with SHIELD. She's the reason I left you alone, instead of flying back to Europe. She said – SHIELD had to be something worth coming to, before you would do it."

Perplexed, Barnes works to absorb that and put it in context of the eight months in Berlin. It doesn't really add up. Then again, he hadn't known her before – that person was already gone by the time he'd met her.

"She'll make it back." Never one for platitudes, he doesn't say things he doesn't believe. Not about this.

Steve looks at him. "We haven't."

"No?" Barnes doesn't agree.

Stark Tower looms in front of them, the windows still dark. Barnes looks up, catches his breath, and doesn't hesitate to grab Steve's arm and pull him toward the door.

"C'mon. You've gotta see this."

In the elevator, Steve presses him. "What is it?"

"You'll see."

"Bucky, just tell me."

"You'll see."

The car stops and the doors open in the expansive Quinjet hangar. Confident that Steve will trail behind, Barnes gets out first and opens the door for Quinjet 3's landing pad.

Outside, the dense gray clouds have cleared. Manhattan sits below them, as dark as it had been when it'd towered above them tonight. In the sky, hundreds and hundreds of stars shine clearly and brightly, while the vibrant purple seam of the Milky Way rips past the horizon.

Slowly, Steve steps out onto the landing pad, eyes up, mouth open. Barnes thinks to hold his arm out, just in case Steve forgets about the ledge. Thankfully, Steve trades walking for spinning in a full circle, eyes swarming over each inch of the night sky.

Barnes sits near the middle of the pad, bends his right arm under his head, and lies down. He's seen them this bright before, mostly during the last few months. He knew Steve would love it.

After a while, Steve joins him, close enough that they share body heat. Steve points at the most familiar constellation of all. "There's Orion. I've never seen it like this."

These stars don't bring bad memories, not when they're like this. Barnes doesn't think the City has ever been this beautiful. "It doesn't get old, that's for sure."

Easy quietness settles between them. The rooftop is nicer, the skyline encircling them is higher, and the stars are brighter, but they could be kids again, doing this same thing at another point in time.

He thinks of the meadow with its fireflies, and he thinks of how life bled from his body while he remembered Steve's hair and voice, pointing at the same constellation that still shines, high, high above. Even then, with everything good stripped, he'd known to miss this.

Steve was wrong earlier, about them not making it back. They may not be whole, or the same people they used to be, but they made it here, close enough to count. The person who walked away from the wreckage of the helicarriers, who left Steve's bleeding body on the muddy shore of the Potomac, would never have imagined today.

With that crushing weight on his mind, Barnes tells Steve, "We made it back." Barnes turns his head and looks Steve in the eyes. "We did."

Steve suddenly sits up, the palms of his hands pressing into his eyes. "It never stopped.  _He_  never stopped. It's all I can think about some days."

Barnes gets that. Remembers that. Can still feel that. Steve's not alone in this.

He sits up, too. "In the early days, every time I woke up and was still there, I realized that it wasn't going to stop. But, for a piece of a second, it all could've just been a nightmare."

"Oh, so they let you sleep," Steve jokes, somehow simultaneously light and morbid. His hands drop to his lap, eyes rubbed red and bloodshot. "I knew what they did to you and knew they were doing it to me. That it was gonna work."

Barnes carries it: a list of the horrible things, transitory words passed between family. "I knew why I was there, from the start. Didn't have to ask 'why.'"

"I thought it was you. You're nothing like him." A hard grimace. "I didn't know the difference, and I'm sorry."

Barnes ignores the apology. "They said I was self-destructive, but it was the only control I had, and I god damn took it."

Steve's eyes go to the smooth patch of white skin on Barnes' first knuckle. It's where he'd bitten to the bone, spit the white flap of his skin onto the floor, and found HYDRA's response to be chaining his hand to his thigh. He's got scars there, too. Fuck'em.

"I dreamed of coming home and hated every minute of it once I got there." Steve laughs, dry, breathy, and mirthless. "Doesn't make much sense."

It makes all the sense. "After the helicarrier – not being with HYDRA was horrible. I  _went_  back. I didn't know anything else."

Steve's eyes meet the painted ground, a familiar frown on his face. He scratches at the skin on his thumb. Not everything's changed.

"We can stop now," Steve says, voice soft.

Barnes can do Steve one better.

"There's a park in Lausanne. It's beautiful in the summer: nothing but flowers and blue water. I went back in January '15, after it'd snowed. The flowers were gone. The water was frozen. The trees were covered. I watched a dog roll in the snow, lick the ice, slide on the sidewalk. It was nice."

Steve huffs out a smile. "After Loki, I rode my motorcycle across the country. They say there's nothing in Nebraska, but I came up on this bright green field, stretched for miles. A sky bluer than you've ever seen. A pack of deer in the middle."

Barnes can't help himself. "Of the sky?"

Steve smiles again, toothy, holding back a laugh. "Fucking jerk."

"It sounds nice."

Steve's left eyebrow shoots up. "That  _is_  where I was going with it."

 _This_  is nice. He doesn't want it to stop. "Coffee in the morning. Gevalia."

Steve's face scrunches up. "I think our entire life ruined coffee. Remember the tin cups?"

"I told you: coffee makers."

Steve laughs for real, finally. Barnes smiles.

Barnes has a whole list of good things. "The sound of your laugh," he doesn't say. "Talking to you," he doesn't say. "Having this," he doesn't say. "Taking your face off my wall," he doesn't say.

"Springtime flowers on windowsills," Steve says. "I think I missed that this year."

Barnes scoffs, "You kill houseplants."

"I'm getting better!" Steve's face drops. "Except for the hyacinths. Those died."

Once, Bucky came home from work and found a dead-enough some-kind-of-plant hidden in the cupboard, and all Steve could say for himself was, "Wow. Wonder if that's been there since the last tenants?" That one's a good memory.

"The ocean on a cold day," Barnes adds to the list. "Nothing better."

"Meridian Hill Park in DC. Huge, quiet. You'd like it. With a book, you might love it." A pause, with a look on Steve's face that screams  _I have more to say, but…_

Barnes is  _done_ with the bad shit. So: "Pizza. I really,  _really_  miss pizza."

"First thing we do when we get back?" Steve offers, an echo from another time.

Dread rolls over him, tight and barbed. He knows what it's going to take to have even a slim chance of getting back. He knows where they need to go. Nowhere would be easy, but that god damn place is impossible.

Barnes lies back down, using the stars to remind himself that he's a speck, and all of this, every bit of it, is a blink in colossal time.

"Second thing," Barnes compromises. "But you're buying. I really want a shower."

He can't see Steve's smile, but he knows it's there. "You've got yourself a—Shit!"

In ridiculous unison, they both shield their eyes with their hands, both of them blinded by a sudden onslaught of bright, artificial light.

"Damn it, Tony!" Steve shouts.

Rising exhaust fumes pierce the air, while a cacophony of car horns drown away the murmur of a hundred different voices. Barnes rolls over and crawls to the edge of the landing pad, squinting down, down, down through his fingers.

Streams of people hustle on the sidewalk. Bumper-to-bumper, cars and taxis start-and-stop down Park Avenue. All around them, high-rise buildings shine from top to bottom, antennas flashing red warning lights.

The brightness seers his eyes.

"What—" Steve doesn't finish his sentence. "We're home."

Head spinning around  _we're home,_ he almost forgets that this means  _no cosmodrome_. No trying to make a way home out of chaos, death, and half-assed luck.

"JARVIS?" Steve wonders out loud.

"Welcome back, Captain Rogers and Agent Barnes. Please exit the building. A car is waiting across the street."

Barnes rolls onto his back and looks up to the dim, light-polluted sky. Satellites roll past, brighter than the stars. Two commercial jets blink their yellow wing lights.

Once Steve and Tony had come, three months gone with no sign from SHIELD, he'd assumed: there wasn't a way back from the other end.

Someone—Banner, probably—had done it.

It means…

Natasha and Sam. Warm, fresh food. Hot, clean water. All the good things.

Nothing's this easy.

Steve grabs Barnes' left arm and pulls him not only to his feet but into an inescapable celebratory half-hug, half-pounding-back-slap.

Barnes lets Steve hang onto it for a few moments. "Let's go."

In the elevator, Steve damn near bounces out of skin: arms tight across his chest; smile turned to a tense, thin line; eyes daring the floor numbers to go any slower, all the way down to street-level. The doors can't open fast enough for him: Steve bounds out, toward a waiting crew of familiar faces.

Tony's already in the lobby, standing next to Rhodes, Sam, and Natasha. When Tony sees them, he pops his eyebrows, hands spread wide. "Surprise. Banner figured it out. The Tower was a good call.

Barnes feels like he should be more excited – but, really, he's only cautiously relieved. Nothing is this easy.

He takes a step off the elevator, only enough for the doors to avoid closing on him.

Steve clasps hands with a smiling, happy Sam.

"Missed you, man. Welcome back." Sam sounds like Sam.

Barnes tunes them out, eyes on Natasha and hers on him. He doesn't move forward: he sizes it all up, considers probabilities and possibilities, and wonders if three months can really end this simply.

Natasha saunters toward him, completely inscrutable. His stomach knots: the last thing he said to her was "fuck off," almost a year ago now, all because he had catastrophically misread a situation and not known how to go back and fix it.

She stops in front of him and tilts her head to the side. With a single finger, she tugs the collar of his shirt down and inspects the front side of his neck. Her eyes flick up. "You need a better haircut."

He's supposed to smile at the humor. He doesn't.

"What did I write?" he asks, although he knows it's her.

"Home and love. It's still a funny way of showing it. You okay?"

The answer to that isn't important. "I'm sorry."

She gives him a nod. "I know. We can talk later. The boy you saved in Berlin?"

The boy in the car, his parents dead. Barnes forgot about him.

"He lived," Natasha says. "Doing okay, even."

A life saved.

Tony's voice carries to them. "Captain Planet made me pick up trash on the side of the road."

"You  _threw it out the window_."

As Tony, Rhodes, Steve, and Sam keep the catch-up banter going, Barnes replies to Natasha with a simple, "Good."

A smile pulls at Natasha's lips. "You plan on sticking around?"

Given what HYDRA's up to, Barnes doesn't think he has much of a choice. He'd be stupid to take off, even more stupid to throw it all away. Doesn't mean he wouldn't.

"Four _days?!_ " Rhodes laughs nervously. "It's been over three months!"

"It's April 23, guys," Sam chimes in, intentionally loud enough to pull Natasha and Barnes into the discussion. 

Sam's date is about a week ahead of the calendar Barnes has been keeping in his head. He hadn't told Steve that he'd spent the four-year anniversary of Insight in DC; he may or may not have floated in the cold Potomac, staring up into empty air that had once endured three exploding helicarriers.

Four years seems both like an eternity and like nothing at all.

Natasha stops waiting for an answer. "Follow us for a car to headquarters. Or – there's the City, disappear. Either way, Banner's sending this building back in an hour. Choose fast."

She leaves him at the elevator bank.

"Tell me you—"

Rhodes finishes Tony's sentence. "Ordered pizza? It's already on the way to base."

"I fucking love you. Absolutely. Fucking. Love you."

Bit by bit, Barnes measures the real, unavoidable, terrifying idea of  _this_  – these people, their world, their home.

Steve pops over, all that relieved excitement tempered into worried, reticent doubt. "Buck – come home."

An old-sounding voice in his head demands that he accepts that offer. And he does. "I'm not eating cold pizza. Let's go."

Relief and stupid happiness floods Steve's face.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 9: The Blackbird Singing._

/***/

In the hallway, the eerie, irritating silence of the stunned Cafeteria following them, Barnes says, “I don’t know.”

The last dregs of burning adrenaline thumping through his veins, Tony doesn’t know if he believes that, but he’s fearless enough, at least right now, to challenge, “Would you say it if you did?”

The glimpse into Barnes’ open book flips shut, everything reset back into his typical look-at-me-I’m-not-batshit-crazy-or-am-I veneer. “Yeah.”

Tony _doesn’t_ believe that.

The elevator doors open. Two techs step out, eyes widening when they see the two of them—vomit, blood, dirt, everything in between, good to go. Alone, Tony and Barnes step inside, nothing between them but that horrible room.

And that lie.

“You can’t change where you’ve been,” Tony says, eye to eye, face to face, barely any space serving as an imaginary intermediary. “But you can sure as hell use it to change the narrative _now_. What do you think that was?”

Barnes’ tune stays the same: neutral, cool, controlled, honed. “Who.”

Adrenaline waning into a headache right smack dab between his eyes, Tony wails, “ _What_?”

“Who hates us that much. That’s what it was.”

“You tell me,” Tony snaps – maybe unfairly, maybe not. No one here knows HYDRA better than Barnes – or so Tony tells himself, until he remembers that HYDRA and SHIELD had been the same shebang from day fucking one, and _Christ_. It could be anyone.

“I don’t know.”

“What the fuck ever,” Tony sighs, done with that answer, done with this day, done with this entire fucking period of time where they have _no idea what the fuck is going on or why._

The elevator stops on Three.

Tony chances a real glance at Barnes and notices the bruised, bleeding gash on the right side of his forehead – from Steve’s shield.

“Go get your head checked out. And wash your fucking hands.”

“Sure” Tony hears as he stalks to Ops, when he’d rather be anywhere, anywhere, anywhere else but here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I genuinely appreciate it. 
> 
> For inquiring minds: After this, Tony pops in and out but is not as heavy as he has been (cut scene notwithstanding). Barnes, Natasha, Steve, Sam, and Sharon carry the rest, and it heavily tilts toward SHIELD-based missions.


	9. The Blackbird Singing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years ago, Barnes' fight-flight-freeze reflex hadn’t existed: it was all and only fight. Fight everything, everyone, anything, something, nothing. Somewhere along the way, he’d relearned flight, no shame in running. Today, he’s mastered the useless skill of freeze. He wants to die.
> 
> A new life at SHIELD begins, with all Avengers on deck to stop HYDRA from ending the world. That new life is easy and hard; somewhere in between, it's a skip past doable with a hard stop at necessary. But, as is soon learned: nothing is guaranteed, people die, the world isn't nice, and things don't always work out. Their clock is ticking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: interpersonal violence. Semi-graphic descriptions of torture (non-main character; including dismemberment and immolation). Dub-con (two main characters). Discussion of suicide.
> 
> Otherwise, it's a pretty light chapter.

On Wednesday, Barnes looks up into an optic scanner, hears a gentle  _click_ , and pushes open an oak-covered steel security door marked "7D." Inside, Barnes drops his black bag, while his heart patters on the advice of tense nerves, overwhelming emotions, and a rationally irrational distrust.

"JARVIS?" Barnes tries.

Obligingly, JARVIS' patient voice sinks down from invisible speakers. "Yes, Agent Barnes?"

Right. Of course. Who needs old fashioned bugs when you have a JARVIS.

"Just checking."

Then he checks himself: nothing about this is a big deal. This place is owned by an organization he's been working with for years; the  _only_  people he trusts live here; and the space itself is equivalent to a nice hotel room.

And it is  _nice_.

The entranceway immediately opens to a spacious living room, furnished with a small gray sectional, flat screen, and coffee table. A new cell phone to replace his shattered one waits on the table; it's ready to imprint, he's sure. A smartwatch box sits next to it; he's seen those advertised on TV.

On his right, he pops open a white door and finds a big, white-tiled bathroom that has Tony's design taste written all over it. The tub is sized to fit Steve, and the shower inexplicably has  _six_  showerheads.

On his left, a small dining table sits close to another white door, which he's heard leads to a shared kitchen meant for four. This cluster of apartments only houses him and Sharon, which promises to be interesting.

At the outside wall of the living room, tall windows stretch from floor to ceiling. Natural sunlight spills in through open wood-slat blinds, casting bright panes of warm sunshine across the dark hardwood-esque tile floors. The view of open grass and a forest beyond reminds him of his old place, abandoned only about a hundred kilometers from here.

Bag left on the floor, Barnes latches the entrance door, drops his tablet with all of the last day's briefing notes on the dining room table, and enters the bedroom. It shares the outer wall with the living room and features the same windows. Strategically, those windows are awful, but he can't bring himself to mind much. The view is incredible.

A white comforter covers a bed bigger than he's ever seen. Against his palm, the comforter is tightly woven cotton, cool to the touch, and stuffed to the seams with filling.

A stack of five cardboard boxes in the corner catches his eye. He takes a moment to think: he'd emptied out his old place before Brazil, and he hadn't kept very much in Berlin – certainly not five boxes worth of anything.

He goes to them and untucks the flaps on the top box. It's filled with books from the alternate Stark Tower. The second box is DVDs and non-perishable food, again from Stark Tower. The food could've stayed.

The third box has books, his beat-up laptop, and odds and ends like cigarettes from Berlin. The fourth is his clothes – including all the stolen ones from the alternate world, which makes him irrationally happy. They're  _nice_ clothes. The fifth box is…

Pepsi cans. Nothing but empty Pepsi cans, with a note scrawled on one of the box flaps:  _"Not carpet. -N"_

Natasha. The thought of her coils a lump in his stomach; they haven't talked yet, but he's pretty sure he's ruined them.

He strips to his underwear, meaning to take that hot shower he's been thinking about for weeks, but collapses onto the bed first, just because. Under the comforter, the sheets are heavy white cotton, warm and soft. The mattress is firm – heaven for his gnarled spine. His head sinks into a stack of pillows, and he pulls the comforter up to his neck.

He calms down a notch.

He closes his eyes and relaxes into the space, fully intending to get up and run that shower. He listens to the sounds of the building, acclimating himself to the new environment. The HVAC runs quietly, a slight hum announcing the provision of heat. A heavy door  _slams_  down the hall.

Outside, dozens of finches  _chirp_  and  _chitter_ , enjoying the blue sky day. Geese  _honk_ overhead. Shears of roaring spring wind blow against the windows, but they hold fast without a single  _creak_.

He calms another notch.

This is it. This is real. They made it back, as easy as anything's ever been in life.

He calms another notch. Three months of heavy, stressful tension bleed away, not something he'd realized he'd carried until it lifts. In its place,  _exhaustion_ settles, and that shower doesn't sound as nice as laying right here.

In his mind's eye, he pictures the seventh floor and the four clusters of sixteen apartments. Sam and Steve in the upper left quadrant; Natasha in the upper right; Banner, Tony, and Rhodes in the lower left, although it's only Banner at any given time; and then himself and Sharon in the lower right, with Hill downstairs in her own suite.

Stairs and elevator banks on both ends of the hallway; roof access five floors above; and the closest armory a floor above.

He dozes asleep before he gets through the floorplan.

***

Sam taps his stylus against the glass-top conference table and handwrites a flurry of notes onto a legal pad. He punctuates a sentence with a period and pointedly looks to Natasha.

Natasha catches it and shifts in her seat. "To confirm, the recommendation is reconnaissance only?"

Maria nods to Steve.

"Intelligence from 2016 indicated a type of Faraday cage encompasses the entirety of the island, with a range of at least 70 kilometers. The recommended plan of action is for three passes at no less than a 100-kilometer radius around the island, with an altitude of no less than 15,000 feet. Collect telemetry and videography and get out. We're collecting live aerials of the island here."

Sam is plenty comfortable announcing, "You know, I never really wanted to go back anywhere near there."

A blown-up boat. HYDRA on speed, with brutal fights he'd barely won, and friends he'd only found through blind, dumb luck. A night of meltdowns and near-misses.

Grimacing, Steve replies, "That's what Bucky said."

Sam's glad they're on record; it keeps Steve from digging for info about that. Neither he nor Barnes ever turned in a report for the cosmodrome catastrophe. Natasha had, and Sam'd had read it. All the dirt had been scrubbed from the truth.

No one but Natasha and Barnes know that Sam tried to kill himself there. Likewise, no one but Sam and Natasha know that Barnes tried to tear off his own arm—the good one, even—before completely and totally melting down. Most importantly, no one but those there that day know specifically what the cosmodrome means to Barnes – they only know that he'd been there before, like dozens of other bases.

"My recommendation is for Berlin Team to be removed as secondary for this mission," Natasha says, factual and even. "That includes both Carter and Barnes."

Hill's forehead creases, more of a twitch than a piece of communication.

Sam jumps in with both feet, trying to cover without flat-out misrepresenting facts. "Given that he recently spent three months by himself in a post-apocalyptic world," Sam begins, then thinks to hope that Barnes doesn't kick him off a building for the next part, " _my_ recommendation would be for him to have a psychological evaluation before he's on secondary for anything."

It's undeniably true, and that's the best part: it's not about the cosmodrome, it's about being trapped in HYDRA's sandbox.

On the other hand: Barnes barely went to Medical for a very-belated check-up of all those nasty injuries from Berlin, so. Getting him to therapy's going to be real fun.

Steve buys Sam's explanation, hook, line, and sinker. "We did spend how many months thinking he…" His lip twitches, and he loses eye contact with them.

Natasha sits up straight, at the same time Maria's shoulders tense and jaw locks. Sam watches her imperceptibly shake her head, a clear "don't" spoken without words.

Sam's stylus drops from his fingers. It rolls across the table and falls to the ground. With the realization of what yet hasn't been said, his body feels boneless, incinerated by the deception.

Maria had known.  _Natasha_ had known.

Sam hadn't.

"Off-record," Natasha orders.

They're going to lose Steve. Or Steve is going to lose it.

_Holy shit._

Maria's eyes widen.

"Maria," Natasha prompts.

Maria doesn't respond.

Steve makes eye contact again, pointedly, at Maria. His expression is – hate. "I know you knew. And Rhodes."

To her credit, Maria doesn't flinch. She meets his eyes, ice cold. "I did."

Steve stares, and Sam can feel—can  _feel_ —the angry, uncontrollable tension oozing out of Steve's body. It's familiar.

Sam feels a fraction of it himself. "We're supposed to be better than this, right?" Sam asks.

It's the best thought he can put together, the best voice he can add to the mix, because he'd thought and felt the same thing:  _he's dead_. He'd spent days agonizing over the last morning in Brazil, wondering if he could've changed it all by accepting a simple apology.

He'd spent even more days, long after Italy, talking Steve down from taking off and picking HYDRA apart, until he found some modicum of empty revenge.

Even in all the last handful of empty months, Sam hadn't put it together: that someone would've had to have known, since Sharon and Barnes were still running missions in Berlin.

Maria smiles, like a kindergarten teacher might smile at a challenging child. "We're an espionage organization. It would have compromised  _them_."

"Oh, and you care," Steve snaps.

Blankness wipes out Maria's expression.

Once, a long time a short while ago, Barnes sat with Sam on a sofa inside Stark Tower and commented, "So, Hill gets really blank when she's thrown off." Sam had replied—anxious because having Barnes in the Tower was still surreal and his first thought might've been  _don't say a roof_ —" _Dude._ What did you  _do_?"

"Yes," she answers.

"Okay," Sam says quickly, before Steve can dig in further, and before Steve works himself up into something like  _smash._ "What matters is that we figure out this shit with HYDRA."

"How long?" Steve demands to know, steamrolling right over Sam. "How long did you know?"

Maria looks to Natasha, then gestures at her to answer.

Natasha shakes her head "no." Before Steve turns his anger to her, she defends herself. "I didn't know until Eicher told me in Berlin. Unfortunately, I'm unable to comment on the breadth of your knowledge. Maria."

Gloves thrown.

Between the lines, if Eicher had known, then it's clear that Maria had known since the autopsy – which clearly would have shown different surgical scars and probably a few extra bullets. Now that Sam's thinking about it.

She'd let Steve twist in the wind, his entire world bottomed out and burned to ash. She'd let Natasha think that she handed Barnes right to HYDRA. All of it, for three long, grueling months.

Steve pushes his chair back and rockets to his feet. With only his hands clutching the edge of the table, the whole damn thing shatters into a hundred thousand pieces.

Papers flit to the ground.

Sam is the only one who flinches. Maria could be a statue. Natasha calmly brushes glass off her legs.

Steve looms, ever imposing, a hair from exploding. "This isn't over," he warns, tone as cutting as if he was spitting shards of glass.

Apparently done, Steve walks straight through the pile of table, calmly opens the conference room door, and leaves.

Sam shoots Maria a silent look and then goes after Steve. Before he's out of earshot, he hears Maria actually say, "Do you still feel that was necessary?"

And doesn't hear a reply from Natasha.

In those few seconds, Steve has already made it to the far stairwell, and he's already stomping up the steps.

Sam storms in after him, taking the granite steps two at a time to try to catch up. "Steve!"

Steve stops for about two seconds flat. "Did  _you_ know?"

Sam responds to Steve's heaving back. " _No._ "

"Then stay out of it," Steve snaps, before taking back off into rapid, heavy stomps – that may or may not leave cracks in the granite.

The door for Floor Seven whips open and  _slams!_  closed. Sam bolts after him, darting up the last set of steps as fast as his legs will go. He pulls open the door, runs into Seven's hallway, and skids to a quick stop.

Natasha is sauntering down the hallway, making good, easy speed to intercepting Steve's chaotic tear. She stops outside the door to Barnes' room, blocking Steve from knocking on it.

"No," she says, "you leave him out of this."

Steve leans in to Natasha's space, a giant compared to her short stature. She doesn't budge an inch. "I don't need your permission to talk to him."

"Don't put this on him."

Sam dares to move closer and closer, stopping behind Steve but out of reach of his arm span. He doesn't plan on getting whacked into a wall today.

"Get out of the way," Steve demands.

Breath held, Sam waits for the worst, while his brain rumbles through who's on base to stop Steve besides Natasha. Rhodes is in DC, and Stark is in Manhattan. Banner would tear the place apart. Barnes is absolute shit at stopping Steve from doing anything.

Natasha speaks firmly and calmly. "I wanted you to know – for  _you_. Not for him, and not for Sharon. SHIE—"

Steve's voice rises. " _I knew._  In  _Berlin_."

"—SHIELD isn't what it needs to be. Think about it, Rogers. He leaves, he dies. You leave, you probably die. Not to mention what happens to the world."

It's not only sound logic but brutal honesty.

Steve takes a step back, then turns his ear toward the door. "He's not in there anyway. Plan your own damn mission."

Sam lets Steve brush by him, headed for the stairs rather than his room. "Where are you going?"

"For a God damn walk," Steve snaps, anger dangling from every sharply pronounced syllable. He bangs into the stairwell, leaving a hefty hand print in the reinforced steel.

Natasha leans—not sags, she's way too collected for that—against the wall and regards Sam with a calm gaze.

Whether or not she's asking him an unstated question, Sam voices his opinion. "You did the right thing."

Inside, sitting together at an island in their shared kitchen, Barnes and Sharon pick from a bag of microwave popcorn, while every word from the hallway sinks through the wall with crystal clarity.

Sharon doesn't look up from her tablet, but she comments, "I miss Berlin."

Likewise, Barnes flips the page of a hardcover Michael Crichton book. "You're telling me."

***

On Thursday morning, Maria catches up with Barnes near the cafeteria, where he hears and is panicked by the drone of dozens of voices. It's peak breakfast time, and it's packed in there. He's not planning on going in, despite the demands of his stomach.

"Are you settling in?"

It's technically Day Two. He doesn't know why he's here, beyond the assignment coming as an order and it being too dangerous to be anywhere else. He might rather be anywhere else, but he hasn't decided that for sure, not yet.

"Sure," he replies.

Thankfully, Maria doesn't question the response. "Remember those conditions I mentioned in Fall of 2016? I want you to meet Dr. Naceri today. She's our clinical psychologist. What you do here depends on her. No pressure."

Maria beckons him to follow her, and he does—toward the far stairwell—thinking things like  _perfect_ and  _great_.

"How long would it take you to write a report - on everything you know about HYDRA?"

Barnes finishes a step and stops, mostly because he doesn't think he can walk, talk, think, process, and strategize all that at the same time. He buys time. "That a condition?"

Maria faces him, arms crossed, expression neutral. "It is. Remember that you have immunity, thanks to Nick."

He doesn't care about HYDRA's secrets. He cares about his own. He cares about diving deep enough back into that world to give her what she wants. On the other end of it, he's smart enough to realize that the request might not be coming from  _her_  – but whoever SHIELD has to report to in the hierarchy of government.

His silence trips her up enough to keep her talking. He didn't mean it to. "He cashed in a number of favors for those pardon papers – at a very vulnerable time. He had an idea that you'd be worth the investment."

Like Natasha.

"I wasn't going to say 'no.' When do you need it by?"

Relieved surprise flickers in her expression for a millisecond. "Send me what you have the first Friday of every month. We'll go from there." She jerks her head toward the stairwell. "You have an appointment."

He walks with her again, his thoughts circling around the report, wondering if he should be worried. He doesn't know her well enough to ask – he'll have to ask Natasha, instead, and that's another fucking problem.

"Captain Rogers is upset about a decision made last year. It indirectly affected you. Has he mentioned it?"

That explains the dramatics from yesterday evening. Barnes doesn't know what that's about and probably doesn't want to know. But: a choice between Steve and SHIELD is null, so. "No, I don't know. And I don't care to."

Given the quick pop of her eyebrows and tiny sigh, she'd known that was coming. "Look, I'm concerned that—"

Her gait slows, while her focused gaze turns into a distant stare. At the same time, her head tilts, while her hand reaches to her ever-present earbud. "Yeah. Give me a second."

With a look to Barnes, she gestures with her chin toward the wall. "Stay here. I have to take this."

Because he's a lost dog or something equally liable to run off at any given moment. But sure: arms crossed, he leans against the wall, waits, and mulls.

Up the hall, he notices a room with an open door, with what sounds like two people inside – a woman and a man, sparring.

The woman hits the man too hard, and the man complains that she's too high-strung. Both complain about a lack of understanding of yesterday's training session. The man gives up, has somewhere to be, and walks out of the room, barely a bead of sweat on his face. He doesn't even look twice at Barnes.

Painful. Absolutely painful.

It's been at least five minutes, and Maria hasn't come back yet.

He hears the woman sigh, and then the sound of her feet against a mat, her breaths hard.

_Son of a bitch._

He steps inside the room and finds that it's a training room covered in floor mats. Only one person is inside: a young woman with sweat-drenched, dark brown hair.

"What's your name?" he asks.

She turns to regard him, confusion sketched on her face. She doesn't recognize him. "Agent Alievi."

"Barnes." His ID and a few people here put "Agent" first. He hates it. "What're your goals?"

During the War, he'd actually enjoyed training soldiers. Phillips sent him off to do what he did best, and no one bothered him. No one told him to be brutal, to show no mercy.

She shrugs, uncertain. "I need to pass advanced combat training. It's not going so well."

She's not ex-military, and he hadn't thought so. She doesn't carry herself—even standing still—like someone comfortable with her own body.

"What's your background?" he asks.

"I have a B.A. in International Relations. I used to be a Targeting Analyst. I want to be in the field."

There's something more there. Even he knows that SHIELD—old SHIELD, new SHIELD, whatever this SHIELD is turning out to be—isn't at the top of  _anyone's_  list. It's a disrespected ghost of an agency, carried by Tony and the Avengers. She could go work for the CIA or NSA and be just as happy and twice as successful.

Whatever.

He takes off his shoes and pull-over sweater, hologram always on, ID badge hanging from his belt, then walks toward her.

She looks at his socked feet and make a face. Sparring in socks, jeans, and an expensive-but-stolen t-shirt might be a little weird, but it gives her at least one advantage.

"Who are you again?" she asks.

"Come at me" is his answer.

She hesitates, then falls into a tight, tense defensive position. Her feet are too close together; her shoulders bunch up by her neck; her chest is tight and still; and she radiates nerves and fear.

Like Steve, all of those years and years ago.

He falls into his own sparring position: loose, relaxed, with total control of his body. He trusts himself: that his body and mind know how to work together, the one thing HYDRA let him have back, after a while.

"Relax," he instructs. "It sounds counterintuitive. How do you relax, when someone bigger and better than you is coming at you? But stay calm and breathe."

She doesn't.

"Breathe. Deep breath."

Self-conscious and showing it, she takes a quick, deep breath. He goes at her with a slow punch, and she blocks it with a side block.

"Deep breath. Every block, breathe."

He doesn't strike again, until she takes that deep breath. He goes at her again with another slow punch, like he's training a child. She blocks and breathes, blocks and breathes, blocks and breathes.

Her shoulders drop, and that nervous look on her face transforms into raw, mindful focus. He picks up speed and varies his attacks—still keeping them weak and, for him, incredibly slow; relies far, far less on his left arm than he ever usually does—but she does good, blocking and breathing, finding her rhythm and a synergy.

She can do this.

"Barnes."

He takes a step back, signaling that he's out of the fight, and looks over his shoulder. Maria waits in the doorway, inscrutable until her eyes narrow a fraction.

He puts his shoes back on, grabs his sweater, throws a "good luck" back at Alievi, and walks toward Maria.

"Wait!" Alievi exclaims. "Do you have time tomorrow? To keep training?"

"Nope," he answers without stopping.

Maria catches his arm. "Naceri cancelled. Looks like you have time to keep training today. Check your email later. And get me your first report by next Friday."

With that, Maria takes off – and Barnes doesn't know what the hell to make of this, that, or any of it. Whiplashed, he turns back around.

Alievi, all of maybe twenty-one-years old without an ounce of world experience, rocks on her heels and smiles. "Ready?"

He's pretty sure he's secured himself at least one job.

And that's… Okay. It's okay.

***

Late that night, sitting in an uncomfortable wood lounge chair from some big-box store, Barnes drags on his fourth cigarette. Crumpled in his left hand, the pack is nearly empty.

Behind and to his right, the access door scrapes open and  _slams_  closed. The footsteps thumping over the blacktop sound like Steve.

Barnes announces himself. "Hill was fishing about you today."

Steve drops down in the chair next to him. "I bet she was. How was Naceri?"

With a shake of his head and a shrug, Barnes explains, "Don't know. Never met her. I ended up training a bunch of kids Hill sent my way."

"Huh. They're not too good."

That's about as much as a challenge as the email Hill had sent him. Per that email: "They're mine now. They'll be good."

Steve turns a slow, appraising look onto him. "She didn't waste any time at all, did she."

The bitterness is new. It's not anything good. "Okay. What'd she do?"

"Let us think that you were dead and Sharon was HYDRA for three months. She knew you were both fine in Berlin."

Barnes takes that in, remembers Sam's diatribe last May about Steve insisting  _"you're dead and Sharon's HYDRA_ , _"_  and blows out a puff of air. He doesn't have a way to salve the situation.

Steve nods and laughs. "She says it was to protect you both. It's bullshit. Three  _months_ , Buck.  _Months_."

He gets it. He does. But: their in-fighting here is only a benefit to HYDRA. "Be pissed later. Focus on HYDRA."

As good as a slap in the face, Steve stares at Barnes, disgusted. "It's not always about them."

If Steve wants slapped, Barnes can oblige. "He put a fucking bullet in his head, Steve. Does that tell you something?"

The  _only_ upside of  _any_ of this is that he knows now: the next time they get their hands on him—when, not if—he'll have enough of himself left to end it. A cold comfort is comfort enough.

Steve has nothing to say to that, but he's pissed enough to launch to his feet, accidentally topple the chair, and slap a handful of paper against Barnes' chest. "Happy fucking birthday."

Barnes catches the papers as Steve huffs away. "It's  _April_. You missed it."

The door  _slams_  hard enough that it's probably broken. Another handprint in the metal, maybe, like the one on Seven.

Barnes looks at the papers and finds that they're greeting cards. He looks at one, then another, then another, glimpsing enough of each of the six to realize what Steve has done.

Cards clutched in his hand, Barnes chases after Steve, his socked feet thudding across the blacktop, shoes left behind.

***

_BANG! BANG! BANG!_

"Steve! Open the door. Steve!"

After the third set of ferocious knocking and name-shouting, Steve asks JARVIS to open the door. Elbows set on his knees, Steve waits on the sofa, not angry, not really.

Bucky doesn't keep him waiting very long.

Cards in his right hand, Bucky stands to the side of the sofa, and all he can say is, "What… What? When?"

"Every year," Steve answers. "Up until 2015, I never thought you'd see them. They were more for me than you. It was a nice world to get lost in for a couple hours."

Steve's eyes sting—that's all, only a dry sting—but he doesn't much care. "I don't want to waste this."

Natasha and Bucky are right: he has to focus on what's important, to hold onto this chance.

Lit by the TV screen, the volume muted, Bucky takes a shaky breath and slowly combs through each card.

"You don't want the one from last year," Steve explains. "The one from '45 is actually from '45."

That'd been an awful, awful day. In March of 1945, Bucky assumed dead for less than two weeks, Steve had drawn all of them from 1940: Bucky, Steve, Anna, Becca. For a few hours, he could pretend they were all still there together. In hindsight, Steve hates that card the most: instead of looking and doing, he'd been drawing and dreaming.

March 2012: Times Square, a ninety-something year old Bucky with him, hands on his shoulders. It was the first and last time he could bring himself to draw Bucky like that – a person he didn't know, a person who never was and would never be.

March 2013: New York, Bucky fighting alongside Steve and Thor, because, back then, if Bucky had been there, it's what he would've been doing, like Natasha and Clint – perfectly human, perfectly capable.

March 2014: the Triskelion, in a God damned meeting of all things, with SHIELD. Telling, of what life was mostly like back then—less than a month before their worlds crashed into each other.

March 2015: Kozerska outside Kraków, in the railyard, hugging instead of fighting.

March 2016: DC, Bucky knocking on his door. Coming home.

March 2017: never to be spoken of, ripped to shreds, because it was Bucky lying sightless and dead in HYDRA's desert base. He'd tried another one and come up with Bucky lying in a hospital bed, his right hand drawn like a half-dead, curled up spider. Both of them: horrible, destroyed.

March 2018: drawn yesterday. All of them together, sitting in the new cafeteria: Bucky, Steve, Sam, Sharon, Natasha, Tony, and Bruce. No Maria, no Rhodes. It was almost real life, close enough to count.

"Jesus Christ," Bucky breathes. He has the 2016 card on top. "I almost did this. I don't know if I ever would've, if not for…"

If not for what HYDRA did in Death Valley. If not for Europe, which Steve has heard about and heard about. Funny thing is: Steve would spend a lifetime back in that place, if it meant Bucky could have this life.

He thinks about what he needs to do to make sure Bucky keeps it. "It's done. We're here. Happy birthday last month."

Bucky nods, over and over again, eyes redder and redder, and goes in for a somewhat unexpected hug. Bucky'd always been a hugger, and Steve'd thought that had changed. Apparently not.

Steve stands up and more than returns it, clutching so tightly that Bucky's spine cracks – followed by a definite, half-laughed "oh, shit, stop."

Steve smiles, and then all-out laughs when Bucky squashes him back.

If those cards represent anything more than his dreams, it's  _years_ of wasted time, ugly regrets, and fatal missteps.

They're here, in the same, purposeful place, for the first time in lifetimes.

Steve makes a choice.

***

On Friday morning, the door to Ops  _clicks_  open with a glance of Steve's eyes. A tablet and stack of papers in his hand, Steve steps inside to Maria's cool surprise.

A new, natural wood conference table spans the length of the room, all of the shattered glass swept away. At that table, Maria leans back in her chair, while an analyst Steve doesn't recognize focuses on her laptop.

Steve glances up at the large monitors. Natasha and Sam are 38,000 feet above the tip of Greenland, quickly approaching the Norwegian Sea, then onto the Barents Sea toward the other world's cosmodrome. It's only by the grace of the technological wonders Bruce can cook up that they have radar tracking on them.

"What do you need, Captain?" Maria asks, but it's more of a dismissal than a question.

Steve invites himself to have a seat, props open his tablet, and sets his papers on the table. "I have a job to do," he states, leaving no room to interpret it as a question or request for permission.

"Agent Morlev, take a break."

In a snap, Morlev has gathered her materials and disappeared out the door, thankfully leaving only Steve and Maria to settle the strife.

Maria unmutes then mutes the comm channel, ensuring that Natasha and Sam won't inadvertently hear them.

"As Director of SHIELD, I don't owe you an explanation," Maria says, infuriatingly even and calm. "As a friend, we had been infiltrated a number of times. Sharon. Your therapist. A group of analysts, while you were in Brazil. Nick can't be reached. Missions have been compromised. I did what I thought was right, to protect them and us. I stand by it."

Steve understands that one way. "You thought it was me. That's why you sent us to Brazil."

Maria doesn't even blink. "I couldn't rule you out, until January."

"And now?" Steve questions, more forceful than intended. If she thinks he's mad about that, she's wrong. He gets it.

"HYDRA had two people, at the least, who know how we work. If our Barnes is right and they have a Romanoff counterpart, then… We're reviewing security policies and data since last March, including at the Tower."

In the other world, he'd thought Bucky was a touch off-base about Natasha – not wrong, but having jumped to a strong conclusion without a lot of evidence. After three months alone, without anyone to talk to, that's about as good as it gets.

"You think they do?"

Maria shrugs. "I don't know. Genuinely."

With growing trepidation, Steve absorbs the possibility and all of its implications. Intelligence. Base layout and capabilities. Sabotage. Knowing full well how  _good_ Natasha is at her job, Steve has no doubt: if HYDRA has a version of her, they're well and truly fucked.

"Steve - I regret putting you through that."

But not enough to do it any differently, given the chance.

On the screen, Natasha and Sam round the top of Scandinavia, only an hour from their surveillance waypoint.

Steve meets Maria's eyes and nods acceptance of that apology. Not forgiveness. Not forgetfulness. Only acceptance. He has to give her that, to give the team what it needs to stay together, keep Bucky here, and shut HYDRA down.

"We have a job to do," he says.

And leaves it all at that.

***

Sitting in a gray-fabric, very comfortable chair, Barnes aimlessly swipes through his phone, scrolling through app screen after app screen.

Dr. Shirin Naceri tap-taps a stack of Barnes' completed assessment protocols on the edge of her desk, slips them into a file folder, and slides it to the other side.

Barnes palms his phone. "How fired am I?"

"I won't know the results, until I have a chance to interpret them. I'll share those results with you, when I have them." Across from him, Dr. Naceri leans forward. "These are only one or two data points, and they're without context. I'm going to actually have to talk to you. I don't think you'll end up fired."

Like a lot of times before, he wants to pull up his hood, shove his hands in his pockets, and slump down in his chair. Funny, though: last night, he'd basically told Steve to get over himself and focus on the mission. He might have to do that, too.

"The referral to me is primarily based on you being alone for three months in an empty world," Dr. Naceri says, the pace of her words and the tone behind them clearly stating that everything else about him is fair game, referral be damned. "How was the other New York?"

He looks behind the top of her dark-haired head at a runny, watercolor painting of a brain. "I didn't mind it." Knowing that sounds pretty bad, he tacks on, "I missed people, and things. More than I knew."

Yeah,  _that's_  convincing.

"But…" she prompts.

"It was a nice break."

She doesn't reply. Sam does the same thing: lets silence do the asking. Barnes knows it, recognizes it, and chooses between fighting this or getting through this.

His palms sweat. The top of his right hand prickles; he ignores the compulsive urge to rub it, and then another urge to guard it. Nothing is there; it's in his head.

"It was a break from worrying about HYDRA, or being recognized, or getting jumped. I didn't worry about not getting back; I knew someone would come."

That's all there is to say.

"That sounds very reasonable and normal." Her eyes flick to a wall clock. "We have about ten minutes left. I'd like to switch gears, if that's okay with you."

What's he going to say? "No"? He  _would_ get fired.

Without verbal opposition from him, Naceri moves forward. "Colonel Rhodes told me you tried to commit suicide in Germany. Agent Wilson mentioned you unintentionally self-harm."

Oh. He's getting fired.

His only response is this: "Yep."

Her eyebrow spikes up, and she moves her head as if she's telling him to  _say more_.

What he wants to say is  _I don't know you, and fuck off_. He can't yell at Steve to suck it up and then implode here; he'd look stupid doing that.

"I broke my arm in Brazil; I don't know why. It hasn't happened since." He stops and considers. "I think it was because of Steve. But we were fine together in the other New York. So, I don't know."

When he says "I don't know," she doesn't give him a hard look, or threaten him to figure it out, or reach for a vial filled with a nerve agent. She meets his eyes—hers kind and compassionate—and nods.

He wouldn't say that he  _trusts_ her – not this fast, likely not ever, but there's something about her that makes this not entirely impossible.

Barnes puts his eyes on the watercolor brain. "And with Rhodes – I thought he was HYDRA. I'll kill myself before I go back there. You have one downstairs who did. Deal with it."

 _Fire me_.

More nodding, and some quick writing. Then, she asks, "What's this like for you right now?"

He keeps his eyes on the brain and makes another choice, this one between truths and lies. "I don't like it. You're fine. It's…this. It's this."

Her brows crease. "It's what? The office? The questions? The building?"

Finally, he meets her eyes and holds the contact. "The questions. What do you know about me?"

Without looking at a paper or a tablet, she rattles off the basic timeline of his life. "102 years old. Born in Indiana, raised in Brooklyn. Oldest of four – one sister, two brothers. Married at 19, widower by 23. Enlisted at 26, deployed and prisoner of war at 27, presumed dead a few weeks before 29. Prisoner of war until age 98. SHIELD since. Would you like to add or correct anything?"

 _That's all you know?_  sits on his tongue, but, like so many other times, the weight of  _28 to 98_  crushes him. He lived it, remembers it; it's not that he can't believe it happened, not at all.

He can't believe he's sitting in the most beautiful military installation he's ever seen, wearing whatever he wants, safe with an identity, empowered with choices, and supported by a mismatched group of people like—"family" isn't the right word, but it's something damned close to it.

Dr. Naceri gives him time to think through all of that, her bright brown eyes back on that clock, then back to him. She doesn't demand an answer. "That's not time, but it's okay to end early, if you would like."

"That's it?"

Her head bobs side to side, preparing him for a big, fat  _no_. "The referral was to evaluate your experiences in the alternate world. I don't think that bothered you too much. And we both know there's more. You tell me our next step."

He looks out the window at the sunny, blue sky day. There's a lot of those here. The thick trove of springtime treetops with their newly sprouted leaves bend in the wind. He sees a manmade path disappear through the treeline, and he wonders what's out there.

A Quinjet soars in the distance, readying to land. Barnes sees the edge of its landing pad rise from below the ground, red guidance lights flashing.

Today, Natasha and Sam are in the other world, entirely on their own, too close to the cosmodrome. He can't imagine not being here, not knowing where they are or what they're doing, not being ready to go after them, if needed, even if it's to that awful place.

Tomorrow, with Naceri's permission, he's on schedule with Sharon, an easy jaunt to the vegetated mountains of Uhlzbazistan. The intel is minimal, but Banner had picked up on an unnatural gamma signature there last week, before they'd gotten back from the other world. Maybe it's something, maybe it's probably nothing, but it's something to do.

The day after that, he's got twelve recruits expecting him to teach them how to not die.

Steve's downstairs in Ops, hopefully making nice-enough with Maria. A text from him is sitting half-read on his phone:  _Dinner tonight?_  Barnes thinks of leaving, of shutting off that line of communication again, and it wrenches his gut:  _no_.

Another text, this one from Banner, came through while Naceri looked through his assessments:  _Come up to 12? I have questions you probably can't answer but I thought I'd give it a try._

For now, he wants this place. He knows what he needs to do to keep it. "We should meet."

She nods agreement. "Twice a week. Your pace. See you on Monday, same time. Enjoy your mission."

"'Kay," he replies.

He doesn't give himself time to rethink that. He goes straight to Twelve and prepares to be preoccupied with whatever Banner wants from him.

"Oh, hey, yeah, I'm glad you came." Banner extends a hand out in greeting, and they shake. Smiling awkwardly, Banner looks him over and comments, "I've never actually seen you in person before. You're shorter than I thought."

"You're less green," Barnes replies, not at all sensitive about his height but also thinking that he's barely two inches shorter than Steve. "While we're comparing."

"Oh? I've never heard that before. Ever." All sarcasm.

With a quick push of his glasses, Banner waves Barnes forward and walks toward a walled-off area labeled "Laboratory 3: Authorized Personnel Only."

Banner looks into the optic scanner; the door opens with a loud  _buzz_. Inside, the laboratory is too-bright white and outfitted with what must be a prerequisite number of stainless steel tables, server racks, computers, and screens. It looks a lot like the newer HYDRA installations.

Ignoring that, Barnes zeroes in on an item secured with three robotic arms in the middle of the room: a sparkling, black granite obtuse triangle, measuring at least three meters tall and four meters wide at its base.

"You have a pylon," Barnes observes aloud. "Where from?"

"Multiple ones, actually. This one's from that base you found under Lake Kręta. It was barracks and this. The other one is at a different location near here; we took it from outside of Kozerska, by that pond you found. SHIELD had some, too, from Selvig's work. Basically, they make the helices work."

Barnes churns "helices" around in his head for a bit, before figuring out that Banner's referring to the double-helix device from the bottom of the mezzanine.

"These are how you brought us back?"

Banner nods. "Took a while to figure out the mechanism, appropriate spacing, and why HYDRA's create temporal distortions, but, yeah. When you have two of those and a helix, you have a swap meet."

Barnes has no idea what the hell a "swap meet" is, but he gets the gist of it. The bigger deal is that SHIELD knows how it works and what to look for. It's now a matter of finding them all and zeroing in on the source of the technology.

"Between Tony and Steve, the helix you saw is pretty much dead; we have it in the next lab. But SHIELD had some spares – they work better. Leave it to Selvig."

That all sounds great, and Barnes doesn't really care. "Is it how HYDRA wiped out the other world?"

With a simple shake of his head and lift of his shoulders, Banner doesn't need to say anything. "I found out a few days ago that they did that. Tony doesn't think it was an accident. Do you?"

A question he's been tossing around in his own head for three months. At the end of the day a few weeks ago, he decided on: "It's very Insight. So, half yes, half no."

"Can I tell you a secret?" Banner doesn't wait for an answer. "I don't think the loop the team stumbled into was an accident, either. If you two had run in the way the others did, they would've gotten every Avenger but me. Dumb luck doesn't get that stupid."

Which begs the question: how much of  _any of that_ , from Müggelheimer Damm on, had been accidental? Had they really tried to capture him that night, or had they herded him toward Lake Kręta and let him get back to Berlin to drop the lure for the Avengers?

Although it's not the first time he's gone down that rabbit hole, it might be the first time he's felt helpless about it. "I feel like a rat in a box."

He means it in an off-hand way, but – the analogy triggers the most productive thought he's had in months. During that entire time, he hadn't been able to figure out the motive for the attack in Potsdamer Platz.

"The look on your face is terrifying," Banner comments.

Cause a scene that big in downtown Berlin, and SHIELD will always,  _always_  react one certain way. Maybe HYDRA didn't care if their Steve killed him or captured him; they had an Eicher back-up ready to go. Maybe HYDRA only wanted the world's eyes on Berlin, and maybe HYDRA only wanted SHIELD's attention on a media nightmare.

"It was a diversion," Barnes realizes.

Banner's eyebrows push past his hairline, and he's about to say something snappy, when his face freezes. "The attack in Berlin."

Barnes nods, still cycling through it all in his head, making sure it actually fits. Nothing else has made this much sense. "The whole thing was a diversion."

Banner hurries out of Lab 3, back into the main laboratory. He slides into a rolling chair, kicks toward a bank of computer screens, and sails across the floor.

"JARVIS, aggregate all global news reports from January 2 and January 3, 2018, by category. Let me know when you're done."

"Beginning aggregation. Estimated time of completion is one hour and nineteen minutes."

As his fingers fly over a holographic keyboard, maps of continents pulling up across the top row of screens, Banner regards Barnes, "What kind of time do you have today?"

All the time.

***

Steve's watch ticks to 2021, when Natasha and Sam come into the deserted cafeteria. Hot service is nearly an hour over, and he watches them pick through what's left of the cold wraps, salads, and sandwiches.

Sam sits down first, left leg propped up on an empty chair. "I thought you said you and B were doing dinner?"

That  _had_ been the plan. "He never came."

Sam can't hide his apprehension fast enough. "How'd it go with Shirin?"

And  _that's_  a good question. "I don't know. I haven't heard from him since 09 this morning."

Steve has tried to text and call, without any response. He even managed to say four words to Sharon—"Have you seen Bucky?"—and he even managed to get one word back from her: "No."

Having overheard, Natasha doesn't even bother sitting down. "Did you ask JARVIS for a location?"

Steve weaves the blade of a butter knife through the tines of his fork. He shakes his head "no."

He's afraid to hear JARVIS say "unknown" or "he left this morning and isn't coming back." It's not even fear, at this point; it's wanting to avoid confirming what he knows for as long as possible.

"Man, he wouldn't have."

"No?" Steve challenges. "He has every other time. What makes this different?"

"JARVIS," Natasha speaks pointedly, "where is Agent Barnes currently located?"

Steve drops his utensils and presses his face into his palms.

"Agent Barnes is on Floor Twelve with Dr. Banner."

Sam clears his throat, loudly, two times. Steve's cheeks burn red hot; his neck even flushes.

"Since?" Natasha prompts.

"1142 this morning."

He was supposed to be with Naceri until 1130. He'd gone straight up to Twelve and stayed for—Steve does the quick math—nine hours and counting.

Steve's curiosity outweighs his embarrassment. He looks up. "Let's go visit."

Natasha tilts her head, obviously biting back a grin. "Let's."

The three of them take the elevator, and Steve takes the time to ask them not to tell Bucky what he'd thought. Reflected in the mirrored door, Sam snickers. Natasha winks.

On Twelve, they walk into the main lab – but only far enough to let the elevator doors close behind them. Natasha tenses, while Sam breathes "holy shit."

Whatever Bruce and Bucky have been doing, it's flat-out nuts.

Holographic screens fill the room from wall to wall, stacked in front of each other from the elevator bank straight back to the mini-labs. Dozens more screens stack from floor to seven feet in the air. It's – like an overloaded browser window.

"I have a 5.9 earthquake in the Atacama Desert. January 2. JARVIS, bank it." Bucky.

Dozens of screens flash and disappear.

"All right, I have forty-eight people from the same office building missing in Chișinău," Bruce says. "January 3. Bank it and all follow-up articles, JARVIS."

Dozens of screens vanish, while dozens more blip into the air.

"That has to be related."

"You'd think."

"Dr. Banner and Agent Barnes, I have downloaded articles of interest regarding the Atacama Desert earthquake on January 2. Additionally, you have visitors."

"Minimize." All of the screens disappear, as Bruce spins around in an office chair. "Hey. What's up?"

Back-flat on the floor, Bucky doesn't bother getting up. "How was the mission?"

Steve starts to say something but has nothing at all to say to this. He didn't know that Bruce and Bucky knew each other, and he has no idea what the hell they're doing with each other.

"Uneventful. Nothing there has changed since 2016," Natasha supplies. Her eyes stick on Bucky, who shrugs like the world is rolling off of his shoulders but can't bear for anyone to know. "Care to fill the rest of us in?"

Bruce taps on a few keys, drawing up a handful of holographic, two-way screens. "We think the whole thing in Berlin was a distraction from something bigger. Bigger like these."

Each screen contains an article or bare-bones news footage of odd events around the world, all of them dated either January 2 or January 3, the same day or so that Bucky came back from the dead (again).

An earthquake in the Atacama Desert – probably nothing.

Dozens of missing people from an office building in Chișinău, Moldova.

A cargo plane crash in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania.

A small town in the eastern mountains of Washington, population 142, mysteriously and inexplicably gone after a storm – no debris.

All of it overlooked for a heap of news stories about the attack in Berlin.

Natasha crosses her arms and tears her attention from the screens to Bruce. "How did you find these?"

"We read," Bucky replies.

Sam asks for all of them, "Read what?"

Bucky throws an arm over his eyes. "Everything."

"For about nine hours, yeah," Bruce agrees. "We read everything."

Excitement grips Steve. It's only been a handful of days since they returned from the alternate world, and this is  _good_  intelligence. "Write it up and give it to Maria. We'll plan the missions."

As quick as can be, Bruce exclaims, "Not me!"

It only takes Bucky a few beats to catch on to the game he's lost. "God damn it."

***

On Saturday, Sharon sets Quinjet Six down in a near-impossible spot in the vegetated mountains of Uhlzbazistan. As she powers down the jet, Barnes activates the scanning instruments and settles in for at least an hour of doing nothing but waiting for analytics.

Next to him, Sharon isn't someone he would call a friend, or even someone he's comfortable with. Together, they're an unfortunate situation.

Twenty minutes into the scans, after an equally long stretch of painful silence, Sharon confirms that.

"I'm just waiting," she says, tone tinged with bitterness.

Barnes spares a quick glance her way. As always, she's focused on one of her scans, superficially unreadable. "For?"

"You to tell me I should talk to him."

Oh. This is about  _them_ , the couple Sharon and Steve used to be. Although he knows how much it would mean to Steve for them to have a real conversation, he also understands what it means for Sharon.

"Keep waiting," Barnes replies.

"Yeah, right," she scoffs. "Like he hasn't asked you to."

Steve hasn't, but he will, without a doubt. He'll tell Steve the same thing. "You're my field partner, not Steve's ex-girlfriend."

Eyes firmly ahead, he doesn't bother trying to see her reaction. This is the most they've said to each other in twelve months, since  _day one_ , even while sharing popcorn in their kitchen, and it's about  _this_.

Sharon exhales, without anything to say about that. Good.

A handful more minutes pass through their awkward silence, while Barnes lets an uneasy thought gnaw at the back of his mind: this isn't going to work. He'd be better with Sam, someone he knows and trusts, while Sharon might be better with Natasha, someone who can be perfectly neutral.

He's still not about to ask for that - and definitely not only after a couple days and one half of a mission. This needs to work.

Bucky could've made it work. Drawing on those memories, Barnes makes an offer that he almost genuinely means. "If you ever wanted to talk – I figure that's why they put us together in the first place."

Another set of long, even more awkward and even more silent minutes pass, the inside of the jet as quiet as its outside. The mission clock says that they still owe another 35 minutes of scans, before they hit the ground to explore the immediate area.

Fucking Christ. He can't do –

"The helicarrier?" Sharon asks. Half a question, it's a test of the mettle of what he's offered. She's calling him out.

He can tell her that's going too far, asking for too much, and let whatever this had ever been end. Or, he can show her the wound and hope she realizes that hers is much, much smaller.

He doesn't take too long to answer - only a couple seconds have passed - and she jumps the gun. "I guess not," she admonishes.

He won't let her off that easily. "I nearly killed him. I  _wanted_  to."

Even now, four years later, after everything since, he can barely scrape air through this throat to admit it. The plastic under his right hand creaks, his knuckles clenched white.

"I dream about it at least once a week. I kill him, or I can't find him in the water, and it's me - like,  _me_. I wake up thinking how close it was to being real." He takes a breath and blows it back out. "Death Valley makes it easier to look at him. He got me worse. How selfish is that?"

In his peripheral, he sees that he has her undivided, stunned attention. He stares out the windshield at a funny looking tree - and realizes he's not done.

"Before that, though?" He shakes his head. "I couldn't look at him, talk to him, be anywhere near him. I just—it fucking buries you. Still does." That's all. He still can't look at her. "Your turn."

After a bit, she says, "I saw you."

"Saw me what?"

"Hide on the roof, across from the apartment in DC," Sharon replies, nothing easy about her tone. "I never told him. I told Fury but not him."

Barnes has nothing to say about that hazy, tumultuous time he'd very much like to forget. Though not smooth, life has been immeasurably better since SHIELD opened into something worthwhile.

"I know how much it hurt him – what you did in Poland. How much he wanted to go back and find you." Her voice isn't weak but also not strong, and what she's saying is about him but also not about him at all. "I know he's hurting. I can't."

His response is painfully simple. "I know."

The mission is a complete bust, except for those five minutes of raw understanding.

***

On Saturday evening, soon after James and Sharon debrief their mission, Natasha finds James sitting alone on the rooftop, the glow of his tablet giving him away.

Before she sits, she asks, "Did you eat dinner?"

"Yeah," he says.

Too bad. It would have been nice to eat together.

"Hill wants me to tell her everything I know about HYDRA," James tells her. "Should I be worried?"

As Natasha settles into the chair, she allows herself a grin. "No. Nick asked me for the same. I sang like a canary. They're a little late with you."

"Okay then."

He doesn't sound like he trusts it. He may never – and that's part of the problem.

Natasha slips a glimpse of his screen: photographs of the cosmodrome taken during the mission yesterday, along with up-to-date satellite aerials of the cosmodrome in their world.

"I was there," Natasha states. "Nothing's changed."

He swipes to the next photograph - an up-close image of one of the shorter brick buildings, the one with the jagged, charred hole created by Sam a year and a half ago. Drifted, undisturbed white snow perches at its edge.

"Yeah, well."

Said like someone who doesn't trust  _her_  intelligence.

Nearly a year has passed since Copenhagen, a longer stretch of time than the five months they had spent together. That time and that idea—of  _them_ —had only ever been a fool's idea, not something meant to be chased.

 _Okay_.

Hands braced on the arms of the chair, she moves to get up. His hand lands on hers, hesitant, gentle, and warm - enough to stop her.

"I was a jerk."

Her arms relax, and, while willing to stay seated, she isn't shy about looking him square. She finds remorse and a great deal of fear. The idea of them is up to her: to end it or chase it.

"It's 'dick,'" she says, intentional back to a grueling night that had reached from Annecy to Zurich, along a long, quiet highway. "You're a  _dick_."

He squeezes her arm. Though he hesitates, he plays. "Okay, Muffin."

"You're a fucking dick."

James still has a wonderful, comfortable laugh, and hearing it is still like hearing an old, forgotten song. All at once, once and again, she feels tоска – in her stomach, in the back of her mind, in her chest: for time lost, for angry words said, for everything they could have been and done for eleven months, for it all.

His smile and laugh fade. "I'm sorry. I—made a really bad call. I thought…" He shakes his head. "I regretted it. I didn't know how to fix it."

On a cold, snowy day in January 2017, he'd doubted her enough to think she had a SHIELD strike team waiting to pounce and bring him in. She had known then: his ability to trust hadn't caught up with his ability to love, even after everything that had happened that autumn.

It's not about that.

"Are you here?" She lifts an eyebrow. "Really here?"

Genuinely, honestly, he regretfully answers, "Today. Tomorrow. And then I don't know."

Fair enough.

She owes him equal fairness, and she gives it. "I won't chase you around the world, James. This is home. Stay until it's easy. When you do that, we'll talk."

She stands up, his hand slipping away from her arm, and, when she walks away, he doesn't come after her.

***

Sunday is a slow, rainy day, filled with training classes and briefings.

In the morning, he has all twelve of the trainees show him what they know. They know enough to get killed, all of them at different stages of skill. Only one of them—Herron, the one from the training room with Alievi earlier in the week—probably won't make it, if Barnes had to guess now.

He spends the morning waiting for one of them to realize who and what he is and to say "why the hell should we listen to you? Go back to HYDRA." That doesn't happen. They listen, and they try hard.

His plan is to spend a couple more days together as one group, then split them up into at least two classes, something like Basic and Advanced. He has no idea what to do with the sit-down classroom, or the 1,000-page mandatory textbook, but he figures – he'll figure it out.

On top of that, Maria wants written lesson plans a month ahead, something no one has ever asked from him. The sick fucker in him is tempted to include a few days on how to perfect "hail HYDRA" and maybe a few lessons on "how to almost murder your best friend." That's the kind of shit she's looking for.

The rational part of him thinks she's right, and, worse, would be stupid not to. The part of him that existed before HYDRA is pissed –  _trust me_ , he screams, even knowing that the right dollop of drugs and the right mix of words are all it takes to make him HYDRA's puppet, exactly like Rumlow had said.

He tries not to take that anger to the briefing.

The briefing brings an entire group of people together: Banner, Tony, Rhodes, Barnes, Sharon, Sam, Natasha, Steve, and Maria, in that order around the table. In that company, he can't afford anger.

Figuring it's what she wants, Barnes intentionally sits away from Natasha. That leaves him at the other side the table between Sharon and Rhodes, with Steve and Sam across the table with Natasha. That's okay: he likes Rhodes, and Sharon's his field partner.

On a piece of scrap paper, Rhodes draws a set of crude pipes and angles the paper toward Barnes, tapping the tip of his pen on it. Very funny.

Conspiratorially, Tony leans forward and whispers, "Are you two paying attention? She'll take away your gold stars, if you're not."

"Are you three listening?" Maria asks.

All eyes turn to them, while Steve barely bites back a laugh. A stupid, restrained smile twists his face.

Perfectly serious and professional, Rhodes replies, "We are."

Barnes stares directly at Steve and pops up his eyebrows; Steve's smile twitches. Barnes winks at him, prompting Steve to laugh out loud with just two short laughs, hands up in a failed attempt to hide.

He's still got it. That anger's a little easier to ignore.

Sam leans over and whispers "really, man?" at Steve, but that only makes Steve laugh a little bit louder.

Natasha rolls her eyes, her sour mood having none of it.

"Uh,  _we're_  paying attention, but I don't think  _they_  are," Tony literally points out, index finger gesturing at Steve's end of the table. "By the way, Cap, burning minds would like to know: when are you going back to art school? My good group is trying to concentrate over here."

"I'm not in your group, Tony," Rhodes argues.

Straight-faced, Tony retorts, "We are the group."

While Steve apologizes through laughs, and while Maria chastises the entire room—something about HYDRA being terrifying but now with portals and time machines—Barnes stares at Steve, but this time not to get him to crack.

Art school.

 _Ding!_  A notification on the bottom of his screen pops up:  _you have a message from Sharon Carter_.

He slowly glances at her, more out of the corner of his eye, worried that she's fed up with the antics. Her focus remains dutifully on Maria.

With a bit-back, silent sigh, Barnes taps open the message.  _"He went to art school after Poland. It was that or go back after you."_

He taps back,  _"Did he finish?"_

Sharon looks his way and discreetly shakes her head "no."

Of course not: 2016 happened.

Barnes gives his attention back to Maria, as she hands out paper mission files.

"Carter and Barnes, you have northeastern Washington. Romanoff and Wilson, you have Chișinău. Stark and Rhodes, you take the Carpathian Mountains. All missions are reconnaissance only; do not engage."

Barnes flips through the mission file, quickly noting entry is by rental car from a regional airport—airline tickets dated for  _tonight_ —and then from a hiking trail near Sullivan Lake. He surmises that he and Sharon are supposed to be hapless hikers who happen into the vanished town by way of a six-kilometer trek through a forested drainage.

The aerials of the expansive, green-covered Selkirk Mountains incinerate any doubt he might have had about this mission: it's as good a spot as any for HYDRA to dick around in.

Barnes happens a glance at Steve, whose fingers drum against the table, all the previous humor evaporated by the heat flushing his cheeks.

"Dr. Banner, you're up."

From his seat, Banner pinches at his tablet and makes a throwing motion at the holographic screen at the front of the room. Barnes quashes his impulse to keep reading his mission file, so he shuts it and pushes it away from himself.

Tony snickers.

Whatever.

On the screen, diagrams of a helix and two pylons slowly rotate. "These aren't time machines," Banner explains. "They're a sort of spatial distortion device using Tesseract technology…"

"…that Erik Selvig was developing back in 2012," Tony finishes, eyes on Steve. "Remember that room of tech you found on a helicarrier? The one that bunched up all your star-spangled panties?"

Steve rolls his eyes but obviously knows what Tony is referring to. "Is there a point here?"

"Just that we lost progress on the project when Selvig went nuts after New York, and then we lost about half of what we had right before Insight." Like a nightmare, Tony looks to Barnes. "You know anything about that?"

It's Barnes' turn to flush; thank god his skin doesn't show it. "No," he answers, sure and honest. Maybe Maria will want something in writing about that, too.

Tony doesn't twist the proverbial knife. "Wish you did."

Banner picks up the discussion. "What SHIELD had was nothing to do with temporal distortions; it was all spatial, all Tesseract – an attempt at teleportation tech, basically. Long story short, HYDRA has reverse engineered the helices and the pylons, created more of them, and expanded SHIELD's research with something completely foreign to us."

"Meaning what?" Natasha asks, the first thing she's said the entire time.

"Meaning we don't know how or where they got their temporal technology," Bruce answers, almost apologetically. His tone brightens, though. "But they're not actually that good with what they have; they're still figuring it out, which is good for us. The Tesseract teleportation stuff shouldn't cause anyone to lose time, but it has for them. We've fixed that on our end with the two operational helices we have – ones Selvig developed."

The screen changes to an aerial overview of their base, including the eastern forest, what appears to be a large pond, and an expanse of grassy meadow and dense trees spanning north, south, and west. Banner taps his screen, introducing a perimeter line on the aerial.

"We piggybacked on our own research and have been protecting the entire grounds from the spatial distortions since February. HYDRA can't swap us into the other world, and they can't swap themselves into our base. We're looking at implementing limited protection for the temporal distortions by the end of the week."

That's real good. Smart. Necessary.

Tony speaks up again. "Until we figure out the temporal tech, we have been and are sitting ducks."

"They could loop us?" Sam questions.

Banner nods, almost apologetically. "We'd pick up the radiation burst, so we'd know it, at least."

The fact that HYDRA  _hasn't_  done that yet means one of two things: HYDRA doesn't know where the base is, which isn't likely; or, shutting the Avengers down is no longer part of the plan. So: either the loop in Poland was never their plan – or HYDRA cleared a significant hurdle, one that makes SHIELD a menial threat. The latter is what he decides, all to himself.

"Okay," Maria redirects, apparently wanting to avoid going down that rabbit hole. "We also have an update on mission SOP."

Banner updates his screen with a set of coordinates that tracks to Germany. "We can move in and out of the other world here, like Natasha and Sam did yesterday. If you end up in the alternate world and can't make it back to our coordinates, go here. We'll know to look for you there."

Tony holds up his phone, screen facing out. It's set to Stark Maps. "What Bruce is trying to say is: I bought this farm house in Frankfurt, Germany. If you're missing, we can't miss you. Also: you can say 'hi' to JARVIS there now."

Also smart.

But.

Barnes has the sinking sense that they're too late, that HYDRA is closer to achieving victory than SHIELD is to catching up.

One of these missions needs to hit the payload.

***

On Monday, the last day of April, at a bit past 0600, Sharon mutters, "I'm going to kill Steve."

"He'll be happy that you're thinking of him," Barnes replies, then quickly picks up speed before she can hit, kick, or throw something at him.

A pinecone sails past his head.

If he's learned anything in the last couple of days, it's that Sharon is an easy sell, the last ten months notwithstanding.

In all fairness, the mission plan is fucking  _arduous_  on paper and about eleven billion times worse in real life. He won't admit it to Sharon, and he sure as hell won't admit to anyone back at base, either, because he'll never live it down.

The two-kilometer hike from the lake hadn't been bad. It's the easterly drainage Steve had picked out on some fucking misguided whim. In the summer, it would be dry and manageable; since it's spring, recent rain has ensured that the path is pure, slippery mud, made all the better by the gradual increase in elevation. Per the topo maps, it goes from a nice 3,200 up to 4,400, before the town they're hunting for levels out at a pleasant 4,900 feet.

Also: they're dressed like the two dumbest civilian tourists imaginable, with thin t-shirts, khaki pants, and running shoes. He's already got more mud in his shoes than sock.

On the upside, it's truly beautiful here, with an upward-sloped wall of tall, green conifers on either side of them. The temperature idles at mildly cool with a light but stiff breeze, just about right for late spring, and just about perfect. Above, the sky's color is a deeper blue than he's seen in a long, long while. And it's quiet here – relaxingly, wonderfully quiet.

He'll take it, even with the dragging, sucking sludge attacking his feet.

"Only about ten more kilometers," he mentions, intending to be optimistic. The GPS app on his watch more accurately reports 9.6 kilometers.

He lets a pinecone bounce off his right shoulder. Good thing Sharon can't see his smirk.

***

On a concrete bench in Parcul Dendrariu in Chișinău, sipping steaming hot late afternoon coffee from a café named Chicago, Natasha and Sam casually watch the stout, two-story office building that had been at the center of a few news articles in January.

"Just saying – this is boring," Sam comments. "It's been months. They're not gonna be here."

A young woman walks her large dog down a manicured, concrete path. Birds sing. A variety of grebes honk as they fly overhead, preparing to land in the park's pond. The sidewalks fill with commuters on their way from work, but none enter or leave their target building, which sits still, quiet, and ignored.

It's nice – and, yes, boring.

Natasha keeps her agreement to herself. She'd seen the other mission.

Behind her coffee cup, she smirks.

***

The mud sucks Sharon's left shoe clean off her foot. Her other foot might be stuck. With wide, angry eyes, she glowers at Barnes. "I'm killing him."

Trying to be empathic and conciliatory, Barnes nods. He doesn't tell her that the muddy, haggard, disordered mess they've both become will only serve to make their cover that much more realistic. She'll probably kill  _him,_  if he says that.

"It'll take a lot. Keep that in mind."

As she sticks her hand deep into the mud and searches for her shoe, she asks, "Oh? What would you recommend?"

"He's apparently immune to bullets, is really good at dodging knives, and doesn't drown well, so."

With a ferocious pull, Sharon jerks her mud-slimed shoe out of the ground. "Poison it is, then."

"Seriously – he'll be happy you're thinking of him." Barnes shrugs and dismissively waves his hand. "You can't win. Give up."

Sharon scoops mud out of the shoe and pulls it back onto her foot. She swipes a piece of hair out of her eyes and leaves a wide swath of dirt on her forehead. "I'll win."

Right.

They press forward, already forty minutes behind schedule. His watch tells him they still have 8.1 kilometers until the target site; although he doesn't fail, he's struggling to see a sure way forward.

Going back and finding a different way through isn't an option; it would take too long to rework their planned point of ingress, and it would risk drawing unwanted attention. Going up the slopes is also nowhere near an option: it would be tantamount to climbing a steep mountain, without enough climbing gear to support them both. Forward is it.

To fill empty time, Barnes asks a question that's been gnawing at him. "Why didn't you tell him when you saw me? On the roof?"

A shit-eating half-smirk crosses Sharon's face, a side of her he's never seen. "Because Sam's the only one dumb enough to get in the middle of you two. Also, Steve probably would've put lost puppy posters up on all the street corners, and it sounded exhausting."

He doesn't know how much of that is bluster versus honesty, but, all in all, he realizes that Sharon is a fucking  _dick_.

He might be okay with her, an odd feeling after ten months of dread and ambivalence, at best. Maybe being back with SHIELD proper, rather than managing foo-foo missions in Europe, is making a difference for her, too.

"I never liked your grandma or aunt or whoever. Peggy."

"Great aunt," Sharon corrects. "She regretted that."

He's not surprised by that: he regrets it, too. In another life, if they'd all made it back, it could have been different. Hell, it could have been different back then, during the time they'd once all had.

"She'd be happy that you're here, and how good you are with him." Him being Steve. "The way he laughed during the briefing – I've never seen that."

It's a little much, with a long way to go until he can decompress in a private space, and his only possible response is to deflect. "Because he knew where he was sending us. You're still poisoning him, right?"

Sharon smiles, though in a way that tells him that she can see straight through him. "I regret Berlin. I didn't realize you thought that."

The sort-of apology is nice but unnecessary. "No, I get it. Don't worry about it."

Her expression shifts. "I think…knowing you were so close would have made things worse. So, I didn't tell him. I figured you'd make that move, when you could stay."

Truth was: he wouldn't have made that move. HYDRA fucked up, forced his hand, and made all of this possible. He doesn't know her well enough to tell her that, or to even come up with any sort of answer.

His watch tells him they have 6.7 kilometers left, with hours and hours to go.

***

By 1730 Moldovan time, the hectic evening commute is long over. The sidewalks, while still somewhat busy, are nowhere near their former bustle. Their building remains undisturbed.

Soon, they'll need to move and separate. Steve identified a number of different look-out points; Natasha sorts through them in her head, applying paper ideas to what will work best in real-life.

"It's been a long time," Sam remarks. His thumb scratches at the empty paper coffee cup. "You think anything is going to happen in there?"

Not really.

She also can't think around why HYDRA would care to disappear thirty call center clerks employed by a company that, ostensibly, provides switchboard services for a number of various businesses, from clothing retailers to home improvement contractors. SHIELD's analysts had determined those businesses were real, not fronts.

Coincidences aren't real. Something happened in that building, and she thinks they won't know more unless they go inside.

"Wait and see," Natasha replies, not unkind so much as taking an opportunity to train him in the art of  _not_ being Steve. "It's early still. Patience is valuable."

Sam nods understanding of that. "Is that your strategy with B?"

Natasha launches a warning look at Sam.  _That_ isn't an acceptable topic of conversation, not anymore.

He pretends to not see it. "Just saying – he almost sat by Tony to avoid you. That says a lot."

She'd noticed and foolishly learned that the  _let's be friends_  option doesn't exist. "Leave it."

Sam bends forward, elbows on knees, cup squashed between his hands. His dark sunglasses reflect the glimmering windows of the myriad of buildings across from them. "I get there's a line between getting walked on and respecting yourself. We just all waste so much damn time."

In their building, a curtain partially obscuring the fourth window on the second floor moves. Natasha plays it off as if she'd never seen it.

The mission is over; they've been made; and the point of still sitting here is to pretend that they don't know that, to limit escalation.

She keeps Sam talking. "Not until he commits to staying."

"You think he will?"

Her mind more concerned with building the safest exfiltration strategy, she distractedly replies, "First sign of trouble, he's gone."

"And then we fin—"

A wall of blistering heat roars into them, filled with shards of glass, splinters of wood, and bits of rock. For a piece of a second, an ear-piercing, rumbling  _BOOM_ devours the sounds of the city.

The ensuing silence latches onto the seconds and stretches them into hours.

Somehow on the ground, her face pressed into the rough concrete path, Natasha's ears ring. Bright yellow splotches dot her vision; she blinks and blinks, trying to assess the situation, but those splotches grow larger.

"Sam," she tries to say but can't hear herself. She tries again, but only sucks in gritty, toxic, burning smoke. As she coughs, she spits out his name, again and again –  _Sam, Sam, Sam_.

Natasha pushes herself up to her knees, raw elbows scraping against the coarse concrete. Through troves of black smoke and gray soot, she makes out the burning, destroyed skeleton of the office building and a hollow sinkhole where the street had been. Other buildings burn, while ash-covered people run, ghoulish mouths open with no sound coming out.

They have to go. Now. They have to go—

Sharp wind whips through her hair, bites at the skin of her face, and steals her breath. Ten fingers dig deep into the soft skin under her armpits. Thick wet droplets splash against her arms and neck.

The ground pulls away, further and further, and it's only then that Natasha realizes Sam has deployed his wingpack.

The flight is choppy and restrained, rather than his usual smooth cuts through the air. His fingers are loose and shaky, almost as if he could drop her at any moment.

More of those droplets rain against her skin; she catches the faintest whiff of metallic, of blood, and she realizes.

Sam's hurt.

Immediately, Natasha reaches up and takes ahold of Sam's arms with both of her hands. She spares a glance down at the city, so far below; already, the black smoke billows miles away, and the cacophony of red and blue police lights bleed into a dotted bokeh pool.

They drop ten feet at once, before Sam jerks them back higher.

"Take us down!" Natasha yells, her voice deaf to her own ears. "Sam!"

It's not that Sam complies. It's that Sam passes out: his hands slack around her arms, and his new wings retracting back into the bracelet. The emergency chute goes with them.

"Sam!"

Together, they tumble, bounce, and roll through the rough air. Her nails dig into his arms, keratin splitting and breaking.

Natasha holds on tighter, pulls Sam toward her body, kicks her legs up, and wraps them around his ankles. She snakes her left arm around his chest and flips them around, so that she can see the ground rush at them.

With her right hand, her fingers furiously crawl down his left arm, until they make contact with the metal bracelet. She knows it's useless: it's set to only recognize Sam's biometrics – and only if he's conscious.

They're seconds from hitting the patchwork of farmland ground.

"Sam! Sam, wake up!"

Sam isn't going to wake up. Bright red blood spurts from his neck, where a large shard of red-streaked glass juts from near his jugular. Skin ashen, eyelids unmoving, he might be dead.

She's not going to be fa—

Natasha's skin tingles. Goosebumps prickle along her spine, her arms. Her ears crackle-crackle-pop.

Time grinds to a near-halt, as the lush green ground creeps closer, as her eyes notice each individual blade of grass and each speck of insect crawling along the shiny grooves of those blades, and as those blades irritatingly tickle against the bare skin of her face.

Sam's body and her body  _thud_ into the grass, only as painful as the breath being knocked out of her lungs.

It's not what she expected death to feel like.

 _Boom-boom_. The ground trembles all the way into her chest. The world spins once, then tilts off-kilter – and it's her. It's her, not the world.

Something hard and unforgiving pushes her away, down to the ground, and, when she looks to see what, she sees Tony's helmetless face, his mouth forming words that she can't hear. Gray specks and splotches float into her vision; children's bubbles, primed to be popped.

"Help Sam," she thinks she says.

Tony's eyes move to Sam, an instant before the Iron Man armor melts away and his hands press uselessly against the spurting blood.

The grass tickles her hand, then her face, and the specks of insects have something new to explore, while she dissolves into the dark patchwork ground.

***

Two kilometers out, the drainage widens into a rocky, boulder-ridden dry river bed, enclosed on either side by embankments of tall conifers and vibrant springtime verdure. The sludging muck hardens into welcoming, firm silt, while unobscured bright sunlight warms the skin of his face and arm.

Far ahead, Barnes spies an imposing twenty-five-foot dry waterfall, something Sharon can't yet see. When she does, poison might not be revenge enough.

He doesn't bother pulling out his topo map to verify their location. Dry waterfalls happen in the mountains, and, sometimes, there's no reasonable way to predict backcountry terrain. This is one of those times.

Sharon sees it, stops, and tilts her head up to take in the full, magnificent breadth of the near-vertical wall of rock standing in their path. He studies her mud-streaked face, still learning her, and sees exactly what Steve must have seen: insane delight at the prospect of a tremendous, risky challenge.

Even so.

It's not often that he enjoys the abilities afforded by his serum; something like this, on his own, would be and has been one of those rare times. No matter Sharon's disposition, the hiccup is her: there's no way in hell he's risking her getting hurt, let alone him surviving something she doesn't.

He considers the safest way to scale the wall, already outlining the easiest path up with the thickest footholds and widest resting spots. It's not terrible - just steep. She can climb first, while he belays from the bottom.

Meanwhile, Sharon approaches it, covering fifty meters in a handful of seconds. Barnes trails behind her, an inexplicable pit of nervousness tumbling in his stomach. He knows his instincts well enough to understand that he's not sensing anything amiss; it's selfish worry about her.

From below, he watches her climb it, sure hand over sure hand without one misstep. She mostly follows the same invisible path he'd outlined in his head. She knows what she's doing, no question – a lot like her great aunt.

Sharon swings her legs up over the top of the wall and rolls into a standing position. Still at the bottom, Barnes watches her assess her new surroundings for threats, apparently finding none.

Although they're still two kilometers away from the missing village, anyone watching the area will have undoubtedly noticed them by now. Their cover as hapless hikers might well be blown.

Sharon calls down to him. "Are you coming?"

He decides against trying to rehabilitate that image. He easily scales the damn wall and joins Sharon at the top.

They stand in a dry riverbed made of hard silt, compacted gravel, and large gray boulders. Bright green grass and weeds grow freely around them, before giving way into a dense, dark thicket of branch-laden, tall conifers and thick foliage.

Threat assessment: impossible. They're going to be walking into that blind.

Barnes rolls his shoulders, something of a nervous tic leftover from the old days. He scans the trees and shrubs to pick out camouflaged humans, but not even his augmented vision can do a good enough job to assure him no one is in there.

Two kilometers to go; their only way out of here is by going forward.

"'Kay. Let's go."

Side by side, they advance into the cool coniferous forest, daylight sinking into dim darkness. Soft needles and decayed pine cones crunch under their every step, while the sharp scent of citrus-pine saturates the fresh air.

Far, far above, an osprey sounds a battle call. A passenger jet soars, engines cutting a white, puffy vapor line through the blue sky. All around them, insects chitter. Chipmunks scamper. Birds sing.

Nerves mangle his gut. "This reminds me of Siberia."

The tall pines. The citrus smell. The cool air and the natural sounds. It's close enough to once-was home. He doesn't know why he mentions it to her, other than it's on his mind and saying it calms those nerves.

"Is that good?" she wonders, uneasy.

"Not really. I'd rather be—"  _Home_  almost passes through his lips. "—back at base."

Sharon studies him for a few obvious seconds, before letting those few sentences fade to unspoken questions and more awkward silence. He happily takes it, as an odd, sour bitterness eats away at his mood.

After a short while, the forest thins, as the tall trees transition to short, splintered stumps and then into a flat expanse of developed, packed brown dirt.

The town.

Sharon steps up beside Barnes.

Exactly as the news articles had reported, nothing is left. No debris. No trash. No pieces of buildings. No building foundations. No basements or crawl spaces. No plumbing. No roads. Not even the barest outlines of where buildings might have once stood.

Barnes scans the northerly tree line for snipers but picks out nothing except a flock of birds, a couple of squirrels, and some foraging deer. Realistically, if HYDRA was lingering out there, they'd be dead or worse already.

Sharon sums it up. "Well."

The aerials had shown a couple dozen buildings made of blocks, brick, and wood. Although clearly dilapidated, those buildings hadn't been disposable tents or blow-away shacks. A storm would have left something. A mudslide would have left mud.

This is something else.

They need to seriously start looking at the other world. He doesn't say it aloud, in case there  _are_ HYDRA ears here. Maybe he'll mention it to Steve. Or maybe he'll keep it to himself, until someone asks what he thinks, or until he figures out what place he has with them.

"You take southwest, I'll take northeast, then meet in the middle," Sharon says.

Although it's a waste of time, he does it without commenting. Eyes trailing along the ground, he looks for grates, oddly placed rocks—like the one in Italy that had led to a badly-laid trap—and anything besides dirt. He looks for carvings on tree trunks; maybe a hammer and sickle, or an octopus.

It's all and only dirt.

Sharon finishes her sweep, equally empty handed. She drops her pack and pulls out a small, folded antenna and a laptop. She tosses him the antenna.

Barnes catches it and sets it up near the middle of the town's perimeter, while Sharon opens the laptop and the scanning software. He retreats back toward the tree line, gets out his own laptop, and opens the system for ground-penetrating radar.

The state-of-the-art antenna—some brainchild of Tony and Bruce—emanates two blue holographic wings, one doing what Sharon wants and the other doing what Barnes wants, neither interfering with the other. Admittedly, it's impressive – and nice.

At the other end of the perimeter, Sharon focuses her attention on her screen. Barnes looks over her head at the surrounding trees and deeper into the forest, again and again searching for threats. Although his instincts aren't tripping, he doesn't trust this, not at all.

An hour and thirty-six minutes of quiet, boring scanning pass with nothing more exciting than a bald eagle swooping through the clearing. It's enough to convince him that they're alone out here.

Initial scans reveal absolutely nothing: no residual radiation, no errant electrical activity, nothing below the packed dirt.  _What a waste of time_ , Barnes thinks.

With the scans stored on their computers and ready to be handed over to their analysts for deeper review, they pack up and head out on their Steve-approved egress path, opposite the way they'd come in.

The hard silt gradually churns and slops back into wet, caking mud. No jokes and threats this time. Physically, Sharon is waning, energy bleeding dry. Emotionally, he's right there with her.

Barnes checks the time: already 1345. It's a twenty-five kilometer hike down the mountain to a rental safe house; then, a short drive to a small regional airport with a Cessna and a flight plan to Pennsylvania logged for tonight at 1700.

They'll be lucky to make it to the house before dark; they were supposed to have been there by 1500. There's no chance of that, or of keeping with that flight plan.

A pang of panic trickles through his gut. He knows better, but the knowledge of safety doesn't chase away the ingrained fear.

"You okay?" Sharon asks, eerily in tune to the stupid shit in his head.

Perfectly, superficially neutral, he replies, "We're late."

"I checked in before we left the town. We're good."

"Good."

She doesn't push, and he doesn't give, both of them ready for this mission to be over, with a long, long way to go before then.

***

Natasha unsnaps the oxygen mask from her face and drops it to the floor.

Coarse sandpaper scrapes her lungs raw. Shrill bells attack her ears. Gray spots prickle in her visual field; those, at least, are getting better, enough for her to see the hospital room.

Impossibly, it's one of the rooms back at base. She doesn't remember making it back, or anything after thudding against the grassy Moldovan ground. Tucked under blankets, head propped on a mound of pillows, she lays still and rewinds those memories, landing on one in particular.

Sam. Injured. Glass in his neck. Spurting blood.

Natasha tenses. A moment later, the palm of a hand presses against her shoulder. She flicks her eyes up to the owner of that hand.

Steve.

"Sam?" The vibration inside her throat tells her that she had managed to vocalize that one word.

Steve puts his face inches in front of hers. "He's alive. In surgery. Can you hear me?"

Lip reading was one of the core skills taught by the KGB. "No. Tinnitus."

Steve nods, understanding clear in his expression. "Cho said that's temporary. Can you see?"

"Yeah. What happened?"

"Rhodes and Tony were next door in Romania, remember? We had you out in minutes. Law enforcement says it was a natural gas explosion."

The way Steve's face says it tells her that he's not buying it. Only an idiot would.

"I saw movement in the window before it happened." A quick, panic-inducing thought crosses her mind. "Sharon and James?"

Steve's hand presses against her shoulder again. "Flying back right now. They're fine. Sam will be fine. Get some rest?"

A terrible liar since the day she met him, Natasha searches Steve's eyes and face for his usual tells, finding none of them. He's telling her the truth. That's the only reason why she closes her eyes, not intending to sleep but finding a relief she hadn't realized she'd craved.

Restful sleep comes for her, and she lets it take her.

Minutes or maybe hours later, James sprawls in a Starkesque blue-fabric chair, a laptop balanced in his lap, all ten fingers furiously  _tap-tap-tapping_ across the keyboard.

Face smushed into a pillow, Natasha doesn't move, but she blinks, her vision clear. She wonders why his hair is messy with dry sweat and dirt, why his face is streaked with gray-brown marks, and why the shoes next to his feet are caked in dried, gravel-laden muck.

 _Washington_ , she remembers. She remembers wondering if James realized what he and Sharon were going to be walking into, given that he wasn't as familiar with the United States as he was with the old Soviet Union and Europe. If Sharon had known, she hadn't said anything, at least not to anyone but him.

"Hey," she says, her voice reaching through the dull buzzing in her ears.

Immediately, his fingers stop typing. As his eyes move up to her, the lid of the laptop closes. "Hey. How's your hearing?"

"Mostly there. Sam?"

James points beyond her. As she pushes herself into a sitting position, readying to look that way, she hears Sam's voice.

"I'm absolutely amazing."

"He's high," James corrects.

Natasha twists to see Sam. In a hospital bed, he's flat on his back, eyes closed, a white bandage around his neck, with his right hand wobbling in the air. Stitched, Tegaderm-covered lacerations litter his face and arms. He tries and tries to raise his middle finger toward James but apparently lacks that kind of motor control today.

"He's fucking high," James corrects again.

"No one asked you," Sam slurs, voice turning sleepy soft. "Go fucking back to Berlin."

James takes that with an eye roll. "How are you?" he asks her.

Natasha turns her attention from Sam to James, then considers the answer to that question. Her eyesight is close to 100%; her hearing is serviceable, still with that faint buzzing; but her lungs ache, hopefully only from inhaling smoke.

"Good" is her answer. "How was yours?"

"Waste of time. Nothing was there."

"Mud," she comments, infusing levity into her tone and a small smile into her expression. "A shower wouldn't kill you."

It's meant to be a teasing joke. Obviously, he'd made a beeline here after getting back from the mission. Any other day, he'd probably still be in the shower.

He doesn't return the smile, demeanor entirely serious. "I wanted to make sur—"

"Aaaaaaawkwaaaaaaaard," Sam sings into his pillow. Given the role he serves on the Avengers as Falcon, he actually makes a terrible wingman. "I  _could_  be high."

Not even that manages to crack a grin. Rather, James looks at her and tries to hide his cold realization that she and Sam had talked about that. "Looks like you're both fine. So. Yeah."

Timing no less than merciful, James' smartwatch chirps. His quick glance turns into full attention, eyebrows dropping into a wrinkled knot. "Gotta go."

He does that, as Natasha glares at a suddenly sleeping, snoring Sam.

***

Bucky walks into the hangar bay with a minute to spare, his hair damp but all the mud washed away. Steve waits by Quinjet Six, its ramp down and ready. Eight's ready to go—with Tony and Sharon on board.

"It's me and you," Steve says, dreading the inevitable question of "why?" One answer is a neutral "Rhodes is dealing with the Moldovan government" and the other is a humiliating "Tony doesn't trust me" – citing the incident in the other world from only a few days ago.

Bucky doesn't miss a beat. "About fucking time. Let's go."

Even when Steve had been flat-out, upside-down wrong, Bucky had stood by him, a stalwart. Now isn't any different. An ounce of weight lifts from Steve's shoulders.

Bucky settles in the cockpit and starts rapid preflight checks, all without knowing much more than a general destination of "Tabernas in the other world." Steve slides into the co-pilot's seat and cues up his tablet, readying to fill in the two-hour flight with a flash briefing.

As he works, Bucky asks, "Tabernas?"

"Two hours ago, HYDRA shifted it to the other world and took six of our people with it."

"Quinjet Six, Control, radio check." Off-radio, Bucky says, "You said they blew it up."

" _Control, Quinjet Six, I read you five."_

Steve straps in and would so much rather not think back to October, when Tabernas exploded and took the world with it. " _You_  did."

"Quinjet Six, request pushback." Bucky disregards the who's who of base destruction, neatly sidestepping that it's almost always  _him_ doing it. "If it's blown up, why do they want it? And why not us first – they could loop us."

Bucky's not asking for an answer – he's voicing a concern. Coming from him, it's a big one.

" _Quinjet Six, pushback approved. Standby."_

Following a gentle lurch, the Quinjet begins to rise, securely skidlocked on its pad.

"We're gonna find out," Steve offers, then shrugs when Bucky shoots him a skeptical look.

The look turns into a scoff, more bitter than amused. "Great plan. Hope there's more mud."

That's a dig at the mission planning – no pun intended. It's not like him.

Steve takes into account the last few months and the last five days; in particular, the last few dozen hours that included a pointless mission with an exhausting, useless cover, injured friends, and now an emergency op without  _any_  preparation. However tiring it sounds, Bucky looks at least twice that.

"I can fly, if you need a nap in your old age," Steve says.

Straight face honed, Steve pops an expectant look Bucky's way, in time to catch a stone-cold glare. Steve keeps that face as straight as can be.

Daylight streams through the cockpit's window. The jet gently lurches to a stop, the pad locked into place at ground level. To their left, Eight lifts into the air, engines roaring blistering heat as the jet hovers in place.

Without looking away from Steve, Bucky says, "Quinjet Six, request startup. I know where you live, Rogers."

" _Quinjet Six, startup approved. Cleared for liftoff at three meters, Quinjet Six."_

The exchange is worth a smile, and Steve finally gives it one. Bucky breathes out a laugh, even as he looks back toward the cockpit controls. Their engines churn to life, a couple moments before Bucky makes Six mirror Eight's position.

" _Quinjet Eight, Quinjet Six, prepare for spatial shift in ten, nine, eight_ — _"_

Steve eases back into his seat and waits through the countdown. At the "one," a familiar blue light pulses over them, and, in that instant, the base and the hangar bay's pads vanish. The instrument panel slides into alarms and errors, all of the world's infrastructure gone.

Eight pushes up and off. Bucky waits a solid five seconds before following suit.

Mission go.

***

Before a self-detonation explosive device buckled walls, warped steel, and imploded earth, the Tabernas base was the epitome of new, bright, and shiny. Freshly poured, bright gray concrete walls. Smooth, burnished stainless steel elevator doors. Glossy epoxy floors. Rooms outfitted with new, modern equipment. Lights that shone as brilliantly as the sun on a cool, fresh morning.

That's…not quite this base.

This base is 1920's old. Rounded, crescent walls made of dark, yellowed subway tiles. Stout doorways built for shorter statures. Dull colored pipes and metal beams lining the low, cobwebbed ceiling. Dusty iron light cages protecting flickering, aged CFL bulbs. Elevators guarded by thick wooden doors and thicker metal gates.

Halfway down the first dark hallway of the first floor, a fully-suited Tony makes the connection. "Uh…"

Next to him, Steve's face drains color.

Barnes' hand wraps around the back of Steve's arm. He tugs and steps back, toward the base entrance, but Steve's feet stay planted and rooted.

"They're fucking with us. Right?" Tony says it to Barnes: a sincere question.

Barnes seems to usually get real uncomfortable with those kind of questions. He doesn't this time. Stone cold, still trying to coax Steve backward, he replies, "Your people are dead."

And this is a trap.

It's all lost on Sharon. "What am I missing?"

Steve's jaw tenses until it tightens into a compact superhero square; eyes, wide and staring. His fists stiffen into clenched-white balls of knuckles.

Barnes ignores Sharon. Done being gentle, he yanks Steve  _hard_ ; he even gets a few feet out of it. "We're leaving."

The look Sharon shoots Barnes would be enough to kill a regular person. "Why."

As Tony calculates the precise moment he needs to push aside Barnes, grab Steve, and get him the fuck out of here before an Olympic-level flip out occurs, Tony distractedly explains, "It's the Death Valley base. Cap?"

Sharon's irritation hardens into bold resolve.

"Steve, we've gotta get going," Barnes says. "Now."

He's not wrong, not at all, but something about it flips a bad switch. A bad enough one that the edge of Steve's shield belts Barnes in the forehead – sudden enough that Barnes doesn't guard against it, and hard enough that Barnes goes down to the pitted floor.

_God damn it._

Repulsors fired, Tony surges forward. He wraps his metal-armored arms around Steve from behind.

Steve ferociously tries to break Tony's hold, but, yeah, no, good luck with that. "He's HYDRA! What are you— He's… He's HYDRA."

Tony hopes more than hope can give that this is PTSD, and not something worse, like Steve being poisoned again, or a re-emergence of the fuck-a-doo HYDRA'd baked into Steve's head.

On the floor, Barnes rolls onto his back. Blood trickles down his face. His eyes skim past Steve, hop past Tony, and inexplicably land on some remote point behind Tony's head.

Barnes draws his sidearm.

… _not_ a great idea.

Before Tony can force Steve toward the entrance and  _out of here_ , a burst of absolute panic lends Steve some of that aforementioned luck.

Steve thrusts them backward into the tiled wall. In theory, Tony hits hard, even sinking into the near century-old tile by inches. The Iron Man armor absorbs every smidgen of the impact, leaving Tony to bear only fearful irritation with Steve.

Steve, who bashes the back of his head into Tony's helmet.

Steve, who strains his muscles to their breaking points, attempting to burst out of Tony's grasp.

Steve, who –

_BANG!_

Tony puts his attention on the trajectory of that bullet. Fired from Barnes' sidearm, it precisely shatters the glass lens of a near-invisible surveillance camera. The red "recording" dot light fades to black.

"They're recording us?" Sharon asks – the question more to do with "why" and "what does that mean" than a factual confirmation that, yes, that  _had been_ an active camera.

Entrapped in his distraction, Tony forgets about Steve long enough for Steve to break Tony's grip with a wildly aggressive jerk of each of his arms.

Steve slips straight down, twists around, roars back up, and plows the edge of his shield directly into Tony's arc reactor.

 _Crack_.

As orange sparks fly and sizzling electricity arcs, Tony wastes time by exclaiming, "Son of a bitch! JARVIS, regulate it down!" and angrily thinking about how Hill's not going to have such a great day once they make it out of here, starting with an adult-sounding  _I fucking told you so! He's not god damned ready. He's not._

His suit hemorrhages power, critical systems shutting down to avert a catastrophic build-up of unmanageable power that could be, might be enough to destroy this facility.

Flight goes.

Then weapons.

All non-critical components of his HUD display blink away.

If he loses hydraulics, he loses the suit, and  _he_ becomes a liability, like in the other world.

As soon as he thinks it, hydraulics go. Tony's stomach flips and crashes, even as he deactivates the entire suit.

Eyes closed in frustration, he feels the suit collapse itself into a bracelet, until he's left standing inside an enemy base, alongside a whacked-out Captain America, with nothing more to him than a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, black Gucci trousers, Burberry sneakers, and an admittedly amazing pair of Saint Laurent sunglasses on his head. If HYDRA was smart, his extraordinary wardrobe would terrify them.

Steve backs toward the wrong end of the hallway—toward an old elevator shaft and a stairwell that burrow into the nadir of a HYDRA funhouse. In the dim darkness, that's pretty much all Tony can see.

Tony flicks his amazing sunglasses down over his eyes. "JARVIS, whatdya got?"

A limited HUD flashes to life in front of him. It illuminates the hallway and precisely pinpoints the far stairwell, the elevator shaft, and three other doors. Bright orange outlines Steve's thick stature.

Between Tony and Steve, Sharon is outlined in bright green.

And then Barnes, outlined in yellow, and somehow, somehow, oh so creepily  _somehow_  waiting by the elevator shaft. Moments ago, he'd been behind Tony, near the entrance.

In order to fuck himself by running into the depths of the nightmare base, Steve has to go through Barnes. It's almost sort of brilliant.

Nearly parallel with the elevator, Steve turns away from Tony and Sharon – and finds himself  _maybe_ five feet from Barnes. Steve tenses, shield raising.

Barnes underhands his sidearm to the floor, intentionally sliding it past Steve and toward Sharon. His hands raise up, palms open, voice silent.

Tony doesn't think that's going to matter much: Steve's not thinking  _good guy or bad guy_. He's thinking:  _this is how it was then_. Well, that is,  _if_ he's thinking and not completely blacked out – and, Christ,  _that's_  the best case scenario?!

"Steve," Sharon speaks, beginning and ending with only his name. "We're leaving. We have flowers to plant. Remember?"

 _The sun's getting real low…_  Tony stops himself from poking the situation.

In his glasses, JARVIS pops in a red triangular waypoint with an exclamation point next to it. A blip of text appears next: "gamma radiation detected." Without asking, JARVIS overlays a 3D rendering of the base into Tony's HUD: the red waypoint is four floors down on the west side of the base.

A helix, or something like it. They might need to go turn that off – or steal it. And fast.

Tony puts his attention back on Steve. Fearless, Sharon's walked straight up to him and harmlessly gotten her hand around his arm.

"Let's go home, Steve," she says.

Steve walks with her, shield hanging limp at his side, sweat shining on his face. It's all Tony needs to see to know: it's PTSD, a flashback, and he's coming down from it. And that's somehow a relief.

"Get him home," Tony instructs. "We'll be a little while. Be careful out there."

Sharon shoots him a questioning glance but keeps walking. Steve breathes heavily, face haggard, but says nothing as he goes with her. Together, they disappear through the base entrance.

Barnes waits by the elevator, picture perfect still, more than a little nervous. Tony walks to him, more than a little nervous himself, and picks up Barnes' handgun on his way there.

Tony taps his sunglasses. "JARVIS picked up a radiation signal from four floors below. We could be looped again."

Although Barnes shakes his head, he doesn't speak, gaze focused past Tony on the base entrance.

"You  _can_ talk. I've heard you."

That should have earned an eye roll, and would have with anyone else. From Barnes, all Tony gets is a very quiet, "He can still hear us. My voice can set him off."

 _Oh_.

Half a minute later, jet engines roar, then grow more and more quiet as Sharon flies toward the transit site in Frankfurt.

"It's a trap," Barnes says, voice no longer trying to hide from Steve. "And your armor's broken. If your plan's to die, it's a good one. We need to leave."

Delight ripples through Tony. Wilting wallflowers aren't fun; Barnes, sometimes, can be. "We came for our people, not to run away. And. Whatever's down there, it needs shut off. We're going."

Barnes crosses his arms and shifts to stand square. As in: he's not moving. "Steve says you can barely shoot a gun."

 _Fucker_.

"Steve's wrong," Tony replies. Shamelessly, he adds, "My aim, however, is…questionable. So, if I shoot you, you'll know why."

"Yeah, I'm sure  _that's_ why." Barnes capitulates by heading toward the far stairwell. "What brand are your shoes?"

A nervous pit bubbling in his gut, Tony follows, Barnes' sidearm in his slick, sweaty hand. "A nice one. Why?"

"It'd be terrible if you died in them."

Because it's a trap. Fabulous.

"You stay here, and I'll go," Barnes offers.

"No way. Romanoff will kill me."

That catches Barnes' undivided attention. Tony smirks.

In the stairwell, Tony stays close behind Barnes. The soles of his shoes may or may not squeak with every step atop the old concrete. For the entire four floors of stairs.

And then all the way down the hallway.

As he slides his back against the wall, sidearm held low with both hands, knees bent, almost exactly like Rhodey taught him.

Barnes walks straight down the middle, his spare sidearm held loose at his side. What a newb.

Halfway down, Tony stops and clears his throat to catch Barnes' attention. With something long-suffering about his body language, Barnes trudges into a slow turn.

Tony points at his own eyes with two fingers, then at the next door down on the left.

"Are you saying it's behind that door?" Barnes asks.

"Protocol!" Tony whisper-screeches.

"Stay," Barnes directs, still yet with another held-back eye roll.

"Uh, not a dog."

"Stay."

Tony stays for approximately 2.4 seconds, before following Barnes into the room, squeaky shoes and all.

He immediately wishes he hadn't.

It's bright and lit. Large. A higher ceiling than the rest of the base. Yellowed tiles for walls. Cracked concrete for a floor. Two thick chains dangling from the ceiling – something like shredded skin and coagulated blood hanging inside their thick ringlets. Stainless steel lab tables along the back wall, along with a few desks.

That's all okay. It's the rest that's…

Their people are dead, and they're in this room.

Two of them splayed open and pinned to the walls with knives, blood drained onto the eroded floor.

Two in scattered pieces.

Two in separated,  _charred_  cages – smoldering, melted.

Tony stops inside the doorway, breakfast and lunch surging into his throat. He cups his mouth with a hand, shuts his eyes, and breathes –

Breathes in old blood, new blood, burnt skin, burnt hair, all the insides and outsides of people.

In the hallway, on hands and knees, Tony vomits. His chest violently spasms; his stomach follows suit. Cold sweat shakes his entire body from the inside out. He stares at the black CZ-75, at the crisscross pattern on the handgrip, and spills himself hollow.

Once his stomach promises there's nothing left to throw up, he drops to his ass and props his arms on his knees. He wipes his mouth on his shirt and can't wait to incinerate these clothes. He can't wait to leave this base.

After too long of a time, he forces himself to his feet, wraps his hand around his nose and mouth, and rounds the corner back into the room.

Barnes scans an old blood stain – or the lump of a shattered bone in the center of it. By all accounts, he's less than bothered by any of this.

Horrified, Tony understands: this is his unchosen world. Home.

Queasy, exhausted, disgusted, Tony speaks quickly. "Who's is it?"

Barnes raises his eyes. "I have all six identified and documented. This is mine – about a year old."

That math doesn't work, and Barnes knows it. He doesn't say it, though, which is good. Tony doesn't have answers for him; a body back home only provides more questions.

"A couple others are Steve's – a little older."

Against his will, Tony's eyes flick to those chains, and he knows: this is where HYDRA shattered their Steve. It's where they…

It's where a person he pushed off, pissed off, and wrote off died.  _Enjoy art school. Bob._

Tony's hand creeps higher up his face, to hide a few aimless drops of tears.

"I'm sorry about your people," Barnes says.

Tony's hand squeezes his face:  _hold it together_. They'd been good people. "Was it fast?"

He asks, only because it'd taken nearly 60 minutes for SHIELD to realize what had happened with the base, then another hour to gear up, then nearly two hours to get here, plus however long they'd tried to cool down Steve upstairs.

Tony's not sure what a fast murder looks like, but it's not four hours, and it's not the bright red blood on the floor, or the empty holes where eyes should be, or the mutilated fingers where nails used to be, or the fresh bodies that haven't even begun to rigor, or the still-smoking, curled-up figures locked in cages.

Barnes doesn't flinch. "No."

Tony nods fast. He doesn't want to know more. "Got it."

Barnes gives Tony a pitying look, then neatly steps over body parts, pools of blood, bits of bone—acidic bile gnaws at the base of Tony's throat—on his way to a table at the back wall.

HYDRA wanted them to find this. Wanted them to see this.

_What the fuck._

_Why._

Barnes opens the lid of a small black laptop-tablet, then taps the spacebar. Tony can't see the screen, but he can see Barnes' face.

As the seconds slide by, Barnes' expression slackens, eyes turning hard, all that nice, sun-tinged color leeching clean out of his face. In the next instant, the tablet is between his hands, and, in the instant after that, it's broken clean in half – glass crumbling, metal tearing, loose keys clattering, tiny pieces of electronics raining.

Stomach churning, eyes finding nowhere safe to rest except on Barnes, Tony demands, "What was that?"

Barnes crumbles what's left in his hands, fingers tearing through the pieces like a round of queso fresco, until every last piece lies tattered on the floor. "A video of Steve. In here."

A copy of a video of Steve, more like.

Tony wants to incinerate every last piece of that tablet into  _nothing_ with his repulsors. It wouldn't change anything, and it would hardly destroy—or reclaim—the pieces HYDRA's kept.

It wouldn't fix any of this.

It's do—

At least half a dozen blinding blue flashes of light burst into the room. Out of thin air, at least half a dozen fully geared HYDRA soldiers appear.

Across the room, Tony briefly meets Barnes' eyes. The arm hologram ripples from skin into shiny silver metal.

Then Barnes drives a combat knife into someone's neck, plucks it right back out, spins and backhands the knife into someone's face, ducks, comes back up, and literally rips out someone's throat with his bare hand.

Well, that being that…

Tony backs into the hallway – not running so much as surveying the situation, and he'll never admit to anything but that.

He looks both ways. JARVIS helpfully flags all, oh,  _twenty-four_ soldiers with red markers – twelve on each side, stampeding straight toward him.

"You've got to be shitting me."

Tony quickly hops back into the room, shutting and locking the steel door behind him. He raises Barnes' sidearm and shoots at the nearest people, most of whom are paying more attention to Barnes than Tony.

Even after all these years, the recoils shake and numb his hand. The resounding, loud  _BANGS_ sting his ears.

His aim is, as admitted, not great. He thinks he hits the back of someone's arm, then the back of someone's leg, and then a desk.

Barnes cuts through the HYDRA soldiers like child's play. Raw, murderous focus warns each of them that he's coming, mere moments before he's in their soon-to-be-dead faces.

Tony shoot-shoot-shoots, until the clip click-click-clicks empty. He throws the expended weapon at a still-living soldier and backs toward a corner, hoping to get out of the god damn way.

_THUMP-BANG!_

The steel door to the room bends inward, hinges buckling. The door sinks back into its frame -sort of. Three or four more hits like that, and this room is going to be awfully, terrifyingly cozy.

"JARVIS, give me options."

All JARVIS can give him are (1) dozens of enemy markers and (2) dozens of individual gamma radiation signatures. His glasses light up with pop-ups like it's some fucking porn site—and not even a  _good_  one—but.

But.

Tony tilts his head and shoves his glasses to the top of his head.

Dozens of  _individual_ gamma radiation signatures.

He thinks back to the Spree and the mini-portal – no pylons.

The technology is mobile and fit for individual use.

_Hello._

_THUMP-BANG!_

Warm blood and brain splatters against his face, into his eyes, up his nostrils, through his lips. A bullet whizzes by the tip of his nose and lodges into the wall. A person he hadn't  _even noticed_ crumbles to the ground two feet from Tony: the skull blown to pieces, eyes still open.

Tony follows the trajectory of the bullet back to Barnes, all the way across the room. He's already on to the next deserving victim.

Shellshocked, lightheaded, nauseous again, Tony wipes his face on the shoulder of his shirt. In his suit, things like this are – not so tangible, without smells, without sensations, without bona fide personal danger.

Another soldier coming at him drops – eight, nine feet away. This one loses her jugular and cervical spine, from back to front. The bullet exits into the battered door to the room.

_THUMP-BANG!_

Even expecting it, Tony startles. The thick steel of the door bends.

_Focus. Mobile portal tech._

Only a few soldiers left standing, Tony folds to his knees, next to the first one Barnes killed for him. His fingers trembling, he clumsily unzips that person's tac vest, searching for anything that looks remotely like a portal activator.

Whatever a portal activator looks like.

Tony easily puts his hands on a palm-sized black rectangle that glows blue in the middle. Equipped with a slide-out number keyboard, as well as a small LCD screen with neon green geographic coordinates under the blue glow, it couldn't be easier to figure out.

Except for the little screen under the coordinates screen, which has two options: World A or World B.

It's set for World A.

Tony grabs it, hastily types in a set of memorized coordinates, quickly figures out how to switch it to World B (either way, it won't be  _here)_ , and yells, "Barnes!"

Mid-punch, Barnes looks toward Tony and easily catches the thrown device.

"Hold it!" Tony says.

"What—seriously?"

Tony ignores Barnes and taps his bracelet.

"Sir—" JARVIS protests.

"Do it, JARVIS."

The Iron Man armor folds out of the bracelet and coats Tony's body a piece at a time. The reactor sizzles and sparks, arcing energy faster and more powerfully than before. Absolutely perfect.

The door bends inward, and, this time, it doesn't snap back into the frame. Tony can see black-clad feet, ankles, and shins shuffling in the hallway.

"JARVIS, disengage and ramp up the suit to full power, all systems."

"Disengaging."

The back half of the suit opens. Tony wastes no time: he steps out, sprints to Barnes, ducks under an enemy's kick, throws out some muscle in his back but who's counting, and grabs onto Barnes' device-carrying hand.

The door slams to the ground. The newly-formed opening swarms with HYDRA, none of them apparently knowing a ticking time bomb when they see one.

Barnes grabs a stupidly approaching soldier—one who apparently failed to see all his buddies violently die—by the throat.

Tony activates the portal device.

It feels like Pepper's peppermint foot lotion. (No pun intended, not that she  _ever_ believes him when he says that.) Cool, tingling, and a little bit goopy in the inside, a frigid chill runs through Tony's body from tip-top to rock-bottom, side to side.

Tony collides with a wood table. It topples, taking with it a gaggle of black plastic chairs that bounce across black-specked granite floor.

190-something pounds of bloody, sweaty super soldier lands on top of him, right next to...  _Christ_.

In Barnes' free hand, he's got a dead HYDRA soldier by the throat, windpipe crushed like a kid squishes mud between fingers. A fair amount of blood pools on the floor, the smell of it sickeningly mixing with the overly sweet scent of ketchup-topped meatloaf.

Dishes  _clink_ onto plastic trays. Silverware  _clatters_. The din of voices stills into pure and utter silence. Someone coughs.

Tony groans, then moans as Barnes rolls off of him. "I think you broke every bone in my body. I'm suing you."

"Okay," Barnes replies, but he really means an unsaid "I told you so."

Tony sits up and ignores the full cafeteria of gawking SHIELD employees. The glowing blue portal device drops into his lap; a cool toy to keep Bruce busy for a hot second.

Tony glances at Barnes, sobered by the mix of anger, uncertainty, and annoyance wrapped into a single look of raw worry he finds.

The thrill of their victory fades into antipathy: their people were tortured, murdered, and displayed, to…

"What the hell was that?  _Why_ that?"

As Barnes stands up—his hands caked in blood—he replies, "Not here."

Yeah. Right. Not a bad call.

"JARVIS," Tony thinks to say, "get someone up here to clean up."

Somewhere in this, there's a joke about Barnes bringing his friends over. Tony can't put words to it, can't get his head around today, and can't find the bandwith to make that kind of a comment.

In the hallway, the eerie, irritating silence of the stunned Cafeteria following them, Barnes says, "I don't know."

The last dregs of burning adrenaline thumping through his veins, Tony doesn't know if he believes that, but he's fearless enough, at least right now, to challenge, "Would you say it if you did?"

The glimpse into Barnes' open book flips shut, everything reset back into his typical look-at-me-I'm-not-batshit-crazy-or-am-I veneer. "Yeah."

Tony  _doesn't_  believe that.

The elevator doors open. Two techs step out, eyes widening when they see the two of them—vomit, blood, dirt, everything in between, good to go. Alone, they step inside, nothing between them but that horrible room.

And that lie.

"You can't change where you've been," Tony says, eye to eye, face to face, barely any space serving as an imaginary intermediary. "But you can sure as hell use it to change the narrative  _now_. What do you think that was?"

Barnes' tune stays the same: neutral, cool, controlled, honed. "Who."

Adrenaline waning into a headache right smack dab between his eyes, Tony wails, " _What_?"

"Who hates us that much. That's what it was."

"You tell me," Tony snaps – maybe unfairly, maybe not. No one here knows HYDRA better than Barnes – or so Tony tells himself, until he remembers that HYDRA and SHIELD had been the same shebang from day fucking one, and  _Christ_. It could be anyone.

"I don't know."

"What the fuck ever," Tony sighs, done with that answer, done with this day, done with this entire fucking period of time where they have  _no idea what the fuck is going on or why_.

The elevator stops on Three.

Tony chances a real glance at Barnes and notices the bruised, bleeding gash on the right side of his forehead – from Steve's shield.

"Go get your head checked out. And wash your fucking hands."

"Sure" Tony hears as he stalks to Ops, when he'd rather be anywhere, anywhere, anywhere else but here.

***

A year and a half ago, Steve would have sat up front, pushed important buttons, and said more important things. He would have been resolute, strong, dependable. He would have been himself.

It's not a year and a half ago. It's May 2018, and Steve lays in the cargo hold, flat on his back with both trembling hands over his red-raw eyes.

The jet's somewhere over the Atlantic, Sharon capably at the controls. Bucky and Tony are still inside the base; Tony, without a suit. And Steve's running in the opposite direction, phantom pains from Death Valley prickling all over his body.

His cheeks become heat sinks. Shame, worry, and fear coil into tangled loops inside his stomach. Fear for himself tangles with fear for them.

_Be okay. Be okay. Be okay._

He'd hurt Tony again. He'd hurt Bucky again. Then left them behind.

Out of the blue, Sharon says, "Copy, Eight to Base. Steve –Stark and Barnes are back at base. Sounds like they had an adventure. They're both okay."

Steve's heart skips at least three beats. Impossible relief floods through him.

"Steve?"

"Okay" claws out of his throat.

Seconds turn into minutes, and he soaks in the silence. Them being okay doesn't change what happened.

Sharon audibly shifts in the pilot's seat. "Don't give HYDRA the win."

It's not a matter of  _giving_.

Sharon should know.

They can't get home fast enough, even as much as Steve dreads walking through the base, fielding stares and pitying glances, and writhing through the inevitable forced sit-down with the new therapist. Plus: Sam's down and out with a neck injury that came five millimeters from severing his jugular, and Natasha's dealing with damaged lungs and ears.

_God damn it._

An hour and a half later, Sharon sets the jet down with a soft jerk. The skidlocks  _whir_ and rattle the body of the jet. As they're lowered into the hangar bay, Steve stands up, puts his back to the cockpit, and waits for the flight elevator to stop and lock.

When it does, he punches the ramp down button and can barely wait for it to slowly, slowly,  _slowly_ lower –

Bucky waits, the tips of his shoes toeing the very edge of the red "STAY CLEAR" line. The rim of the ramp settles two inches from his feet, which essentially puts Bucky right smack dab in front of Steve.

Steve could smash through the windshield and get out that way.

Arms crossed, face impassive, with a deep, crescent-shaped, stitched laceration above his right eyebrow, Bucky waits.

Steve has nothing to say, and, seriously, considers going through the windshield. Until then, Steve stands still, feet planted. Nothing prepares him for what Bucky says.

"Stark can't shoot. And his fucking shoes – they squeak  _so loud_. Fuck you for leaving me with that." Bucky steps sideways, looks behind Steve, and continues with, "And fuck you too, Carter."

"I'm not here to fuck around with you, Barnes," Sharon replies – teasing, not mean.

Bucky takes that with an eye roll, then looks back to Steve with another impassive stare. "You gotta get off the jet."

Sharon does: she shoulders past Steve and then around Bucky, walking off toward the causeway.

"Buck." Steve shakes his head. "I… It all came back."

Bucky stalks up the ramp. Steve's heart skips again. Adrenaline trips a livewire called "fear." It's  _Bucky_  – and that place, that God damn place, brought it all back.

It's Bucky, alive and here, safe and himself.

Before Bucky makes it halfway up the incline, Steve attacks him with a hug. Fingers bunched into the back of Bucky's t-shirt, Steve strangles out, "I'm sorry."

They're barely alone. Jet techs and hangar crew bustle and hustle all around them; in the cavernous hangar bay, voices travel in long echoes.

Bucky hugs him back harder.

***

Early on Tuesday morning, Barnes knocks on Naceri's door and enters at her welcoming signal. He sits in the same chair as before and looks at the same watercolor brain as before. Before he knows it, he's slipped into HYDRA's three-three breathing rhythm, and  _no_.

He puts his attention on Naceri instead.

"Almost one week down. How does it feel?"

Not great. Less than okay.

The partnership with Sharon has taken a complete, unexpected change for the better. It might actually work out. The trainees are okay. Steve's alive. Sam's alive. Natasha is – also alive, and a relationship he's eviscerated. Maria's fine. Banner is fine. Rhodes is fine. Stark's…weird.

"Fine."

Naceri lets him hang with that, clearly expecting him to come up with something better. He can't imagine what it would be and can't make his brain spin fast enough to figure it out. He's exhausted for no reason and restless enough that he could pull out of his skin. It's been nonstop shit-to-do for days, and his tank is –

Oh. He might as well sum that up for her, give her something to chew on.

"I didn't realize how tiring it would be to be here. Keeping up with people is fucking hard."

Naceri offers a smile. "Today's your day off?"

He nods.

"Big plans?"

"Reading a book. Writing a couple reports."

Honestly. Then visit Sam, before hiding away the rest of the night and finishing those reports – two AARs and the Canary Report he owes Maria on Friday.

"Is reading relaxing for you?" When he nods "yes," she jerks her chin toward the window behind him. "It's going to be a nice day. The pond will be quiet. Have you been out there yet?"

"Not yet."

But that  _had_ been his plan for today: go somewhere no one will find him, especially that asshole JARVIS. That doesn't work as well when his god damn  _therapist_  knows where he's going to be.

"Well, don't let me hold you up."

Blindsided, Barnes doesn't know how to respond. "It's – it's been five minutes."

More like four.

"You seem high strung to me. You have a plan for self-care and relaxation. That's what we would have worked on today. Unless you have something you would like to talk about it, I don't believe in doing counseling for the sake of counseling."

It's almost like a trap, but he takes that chance and hauls ass back to his room.

There, he meticulously packs a water-resistant black bag with two sets of clothes, a ballcap, two combat knives, a nine-millimeter with two clips of ammunition, a wad of cash, cigarettes, and a bit of non-perishable food, like chips, bottled water, and a jar of peanut butter.

He picks out a book that will last him a whole day, takes a few smuggled cafeteria sandwiches from the refrigerator, and walks off the base without seeing more than three people, all with unfamiliar faces.

The grass is cold and wet and soaks through his sneakers, while dew droplets dot late-blooming tulips and daffodils. Beyond the treetops, the bright orange sun looms above the horizon, promising the best part of the day.

Down the hill, he cuts onto the muddy trail and follows it for a few hundred meters. The cool spring air feels good against his skin, while dozens of early morning birds chirp their songs and flit between branches.

Barnes leaves the trail and crunches into the forest proper. About 150 meters east, he glimpses a large area of broken concrete slabs, rusted farm machinery, and tall grass - likely dumped out here years and years ago, before Tony bought the land.

When he reaches the dumping site, he lifts one of the largest, heaviest slabs with his left arm and tosses the bag into a hollow, dark space near the back corner. He gently lets the concrete back down and commits its location to memory, for the promise of a bad day.

Barnes lets out a deep breath, tension easing.

He treks back to the trail and idly walks the rest of the way to the pond, in no particular hurry to start the day.

He intentionally settles at the far stretch of the water, where bright green cattails and lily pads cluster. Frogs chirp and dive, snakes slither away, and turtles dunk under the water, all before Barnes sits in a weather-faded chair left by someone long before him, cracks open the book, and commits his day to nothing at all.

When the sun has rolled past the midpoint of the sky, and when Barnes is only a few pages from the middle of the book, Steve comes with a drawing tablet, a quick squeeze of the shoulder, and surprising, comfortable silence.

Steve's better than he was yesterday – and, though that doesn't say a lot, it is a lot. That might be all that matters.

It's been almost a week, and it's been okay.

***

Early May bleeds through June and through early July. It hasn't gotten easy – but it's not hard. Somewhere in between, this place and this life is a skip past doable with a hard stop at necessary.

The Basic Combat class trickles out of the classroom, chatting and laughing. Barnes wipes down the whiteboard, having somewhat figured out how to handle a sit-down classroom. The written plans, of all things, help.

Behind him, Natasha thinks she's snuck up.

She—and  _them_ —issomething he  _hasn't_  figured out. Naceri says to see the good in it: to embrace that he can stand without her. Point taken,  _but_. He's better with her,  _and._  He misses her.

"Hey there," Natasha greets.

Barnes plops the dry erase marker onto the silver tray ledge and turns to regard Natasha. He's surprised by how  _tired_  she looks: pale skin, drawn eyes, palpable restlessness under her skin.

Their schedules run opposite, leaving hardly any room to catch up and see each other. Now and then over the last two months, they've talked in the hallway, grabbed lunch with others, but nothing routine, nothing often. It's no excuse not to have noticed.

"Hey," he replies. "I've got Naceri in ten."

And it's with Steve today. He expects to regret it – but also for it to help Steve finally commit to going.

Those ten minutes leave enough time to pick up breakfast for him and Steve, as well as customary coffee for Naceri, then to get down to Four. Barnes stacks his tablet atop the textbook, picks them both up, and makes to leave.

She takes a step forward into his space. "We have time."

He steps back, the marker ledge pushing into his thigh. "C'mon. Don't do this."

Natasha takes a single bite at her cheek and steps forward again. Her unashamed eyes drill into his, doing all the talking. He doesn't like what she's saying – not like this, not after the past two months, not without something more.

Barnes leans into whiteboard and slides the book and tablet back onto the desk, all so he can cross his arms. It provides a measure of solace.

"You have a briefing," he says. He only knows because  _Sam_ has the same briefing, hadn't done his homework, and wouldn't eat breakfast with him this morning. "Dinner tomorrow?"

The offer is borne of the desperate way he misses talking to her. Love aside, she left a hole in his life, one he'd packed with explosives and detonated.

Her hands slam into his chest, red-chipped fingernails splayed above his crossed arms. "I don't want  _dinner_."

Gaining inches of height by her tiptoes, her lips smush into his, while one of her hands snakes down to his pants and takes ahold of what she finds. Her lips curl into a smile, and she pulls back enough to comment, "Neither do you."

His instincts tell him  _no_. His dick tells him  _yes_. His brain says  _I miss you_.

_Fuck it._

He furiously unzips and unbuttons her pants, as he pushes off the board and walks them into the relative privacy of the training gym. As Natasha roughly bites his neck, he closes the door, and then gets them behind a pile of mats right before Natasha goes absolutely, full-tilt  _doing this_.

After, both of them more than late, Barnes hurriedly collects his stuff then a couple of pre-wrapped breakfast burritos and three coffees from the busy cafeteria. All of it balanced in his hands, he speeds past the all-American, July 4th star-spangled banner hanging in soft, loose dips across the walls (an easy reminder that Steve's birthday is in two days), and then down the granite stairs to Four, not a drop of coffee spilt.

Steve is already in Naceri's office: silently sitting across from her, eyes focused on his hands. Naceri sees Barnes and gives him a tight, nervous smile. She's about as happy about this idea as he is. Super.

"Sorry I'm late. A trainee had a question."

Naceri nods easy acceptance of that; Barnes almost feels bad for the lie. Steve doesn't look up from his hands.

Barnes goes inside, carefully places two cups of coffee and a stack of burritos on Naceri's desk, and drops into the chair next to Steve, with his book and tablet in his lap and the third coffee cup in his right hand.

"Hey," he says to Steve. "Food."

He brings Naceri coffee every morning they meet. A bribe, she jokes. He goes along with it: anything to avoid admitting that he might look forward to this time, and anything to avoid admitting that it's a Bucky thing to do – part of the old charm offensive.

Steve glances at him, then doubletakes, a mix of confused realization showing on his face. "Hey, Buck. Which trainee?"

He can smell it. Fucking perfect. Barnes glares at him.

Naceri takes a cup. "Captain – this was your request. Could you explain a little about why?"

Steve looks back to his empty hands. Barnes pushes his coffee cup at Steve at the same time he reaches for the lonely one sitting on Naceri's desk.

With a sigh, Steve takes it. "I thought it would be easier to be here. Did you drink out of this?"

"Yeah. Worried about my HYDRA herpes?"

It does the job: Steve cracks a smile. "You can't blame HYDRA for everything."

Barnes drinks coffee and shrugs. "Sure I can."

Steve's smile fades, and he gets real serious about this. "You really come here twice a week? And you talk?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because I want to keep whatever this is here."

Steve leans forward, elbows on knees, and looks sideways at Barnes. "No one's going to kick you out if you don't."

How incredibly shortsighted. " _I_  will. Shirin's talked me down more times than you want to know about."

He doesn't know where "Shirin" suddenly comes from instead of "Naceri," and he ignores that he'd said it.

Steve looks to Naceri for confirmation of that, and she gives it with a set of bobble-headed nods. "We usually talk more about counseling theories. I lend him books. Nothing is forced, Captain."

"But we do talk about things," Barnes adds, tone intentionally soft. "It helps."

Superficial things that don't entirely matter. There is no one on this planet that he hates enough to burden with HYDRA's 70 years. For Steve, though, it's important to hear it.

Gaze averted back to his occupied hands, Steve frowns. "The other one—Russell—wasn't like that."

Emma Russell, HYDRA's plant that had kept the mindfuck going for Steve long after Death Valley. As far as Barnes has been told, she disappeared into the night last April, a week or so before Brazil. SHIELD's never found her. Steve's never talked about her.

Barnes has an idea about where she ended up, what she's doing, and who she's doing it with. He hasn't told anyone. Doesn't plan to.

Naceri sits up straighter and poises her pencil, ready to scratch at her yellow paper.

"She showed me pictures of you from Death Valley and the Tower." Steve would use the same tone and cadence ordering off a restaurant menu. "She said I murdered you and had to accept what I did."

"Still here," Barnes reminds him. "You didn't."

"She drugged my food, like they did to Sharon."

Barnes grabs ahold of a burst of anger and reigns it back.  _Not now_.

"Brazil wasn't you, Buck. It was her drugs wearing off, only we didn't know it then."

Barnes has known that for a long time – since Brazil. That anger still roars to be heard, and an easy part of his brain wants a list and a gun, and he wants to go  _now_.

Finally, Steve stops staring at his hands, sits up, and pins Barnes with an earnest, hard look. "They made me go to her. They held you over my head. Here I am again."

 _They_ : Natasha, Maria, probably Tony, definitely Sam. All of them thought they'd been doing the right thing for Steve; Steve knows that.

"I'm not coming back to you," Steve states to Naceri, remarkably calm. "They can have the shield. I don't care."

Steve isn't the shield, and he sure as hell isn't the costume or the dumb fucking name. He never needed any of that to want to do the right thing, always. To always know what the right thing was to do.

"I come here so I don't hurt people. Have a flashback in a Quinjet. Flip out or shut down during a mission. You know that door on Seven that slams? That fucker sets me off at least once a week. What if I lose it and you aren't around to stop me? What if I hurt Sharon, or Sam, or Nat – or Howard's kid?"

Steve's jaw tightens, and his eyes might shine. He knows where Barnes is going, he knows what Barnes isn't saying— _that you've flipped out and hurt people, you've hurt Howard's kid—_ and he's letting himself be dragged all the way there.

"I don't deserve this. But none of you deserve  _that_. It's not about me." Barnes glares at Naceri and her scribbling pencil. "Are you for fucking real writing that down?"

Naceri wisely stays quiet but bobs her head "yes, you sure as hell bet."

Whatever.

"What if you hurt someone again," Barnes says, not a fucking question. Steve won't survive it. "She's not Russell. She's not HYDRA."

Steve doesn't seem angry when he says, "You too?" But betrayed anger shows when he leaves without another word said.

Unconcerned, Barnes wonders why he had to be here for this. He regards Naceri. "You're not HYDRA, are you?"

"No, I'm not," Naceri replies, serious. "I'll worry about him. Let's talk about some of that."

He can guess what she wants to talk about. She keyed into the last part more than anything—about him not deserving this. They've talked about the rest of it, more or less.

"When I think of the worst thing I ever did, who I killed, I wonder what they'd think about this. Being healthy. Learning to 'forgive myself.'" He says it with intentional, acerbic derision, as he thinks of Tony's parents, of the room full of kids, of the airliner, of a hundred more, one by one by one. "It's a joke."

Not a whole lot shakes Naceri. Although that doesn't come close, her pencil holds still. "What do you owe them instead?"

"Something like what I'm doing here."

Something like that boy in Berlin: one life saved instead of taken.

She switches gears. "Hindsight being what it is, what would you have done differently?"

He's thought about that, especially with the other version of himself dead downstairs. The fairest answer he can give her is "it wouldn't've taken me seventy whatever years to figure out how to do it right."

Quizzical, Naceri opens her mouth to ask for clarification, but then she figures it out. "Do you have a plan to kill yourself?"

Yes, but not the plan her books talk about, and not the plan she's wondering about. "No. You asked. That's hindsight."

She actually hesitates, the weight of the conversation cremating their hard-won familiarity. "My understanding is that you tried to kill yourself several times. What do you think you could have changed?"

Easy. "I could've held on longer. Made them kill me."

The world would be better.  _He_ would be better.

"I think they would've," he adds, realizing in that instant how  _untrue_ that is. They wouldn't have.

A memory dredges itself to the surface: dying in a cell, hanging by a tight collar, and waking up alive. Not even that; not even then. A flash of clarity incinerates his guilt, shame, and remorse. For less than a blink of an eye, a gasp of a breath, it tells him  _you did everything you could_ , and, for that blink in time, he's absolved.

The weight of everything he's done, all of those he's killed, crashes back down. It buries him.

He catches his breath, not sure when he'd lost it. "Worry about Steve. I'm fine."

"I can worry about both of you just fine."

Whatever. "Can we call that a day?"

Today is all rain, storms, and hot humidity – a good day to stay inside, on a day that's already proving to be total shit at only 0945.

A book and a TV show aren't going to cut it. He's craving some hours in the quiet part of the gym, where Stark's hard-holographic punching bag is calling his name.

"Sure. Make up the time after your mission tomorrow – 2030."

Whatever it takes to get out of this room today and right now.

***

Steve flicks his eyes up at the optic reader and pushes through the double doors. He walks inside the cold, white room with cold, gray drawers and—

Completely doesn't expect Natasha to be down here. She's got the drawer with the other Bucky pulled out.

"You and Sam leave in thirty. Cutting it a little close?"

As Steve walks further inside, he sees she has Bucky's clenched left hand in her hand and her phone in the other. Always texting someone.

She glances over her shoulder at Steve. "Getting some thoughts together. What are you doing down here?"

Steve huffs out a pathetic smile and settles on the opposite side of the body, across from her. "Same thing. He just ripped my ass. Did I get that saying right?"

Down here, she looks infinitely more tired than she had in the hallway this morning. Maybe it's this room, or maybe he hadn't noticed, caught up in his own issues.

Natasha lifts a shoulder and pockets her phone. She leaves Bucky's fisted hand on the stainless steel table, drags her fingers over the bullet hole in his forehead, and steps back.

"I haven't been down here in months," Steve says, thankful, as always, for her patient ear. Maybe that ear is why she's so tired. "He…helps to put things into perspective."

Natasha tilts her head, something like wistfulness in her expression. "I miss him."

Of all people, Steve knows about wasted time and opportunities. Bucky and Natasha don't have any excuse – and, by the smell on both of them, they didn't waste an opportunity or make any excuses this morning.

"They'll be back by 1930 tomorrow, you know," Steve hints. "Just in time for dinner."

Natasha nods, not a smile cracked. "Where are they going again?"

"Just east of Antofagasta, Chile. Bruce detected another signal."

"I'll plan for dinner then. Gotta go."

Natasha leaves for her mission, and Steve stays for a handful more minutes. He churns through what Bucky had said with Naceri, and, damn it, knows he's right. This body here takes the question out of a lot of answers.

Steve squeezes the arm before pulling the sheet over the face and pushing the drawer back inside the housing.

"JARVIS, where's Bucky?"

"Agent Barnes is currently located in the Fifth Floor gym, Captain."

That's where Steve goes.

On her way out of the gym, one of the  _actual_  trainees warns, "I wouldn't go near him, Captain."

From the back of the gym, near the holo-bag, Steve hears pounding. "Thanks."

Unworried, Steve approaches the flurry of punching, noting that Bucky isn't doing any sort of boxing routine. He's just  _punching_.

"Don't break the bag, Buck," Steve teases.

Tony calls it a hard-hologram: something about the image being fake but with an impressive manipulation of some sort of energy that makes it feel tangible, hard, punch-able, and, most importantly, unbreakable. "Like punching a forcefield," Bruce had unhelpfully explained.

"Quit wearing my fucking clothes," Bucky bites, as he throws a ferocious, unrestrained right hook at the hazy, matte-black bag.

Steve chances a glance at his sweater sleeve: it's Bucky's. That explains why the shoulders feel a little tight.

Bucky's fist strikes the energy; the hit is strong enough to create a rolling pulse of gray light and an unmistakable trembling along the concrete floor. Bucky might not be able to destroy a hologram, but the floor-bolted emitter isn't immune to either of them.

Bucky's left arm upper cuts into the black image, throwing off another burst of gray light. "Weren't you pissed off or something?"

"Weren't you  _not_?" Steve retorts, at the same time he notices that Bucky's got the bag set on what amounts to "brick wall." It doesn't swing, and the energy doesn't cushion: hologram or not, it still hurts, especially without gloves or tape. "Buck, stop."

"Go away."

"JARVIS, turn—"

"JARVIS, don't you fucking dare."

"—the density level down to five."

Coming off a fresh punch, the bag swings widely. Bucky sidesteps out of its path and sticks Steve with a look of incensed annoyance.

Five might be a little low.

"Want lunch?" Steve innocently asks.

"Want to go to hell? JARVIS, reset it to eight."

JARVIS complies, and Bucky punches, punches, punches the unmoving, brick-wall bag with a red-raw fist.

Lured by the rumble of his own stomach, Steve gives up on that battle. "No, just lunch. It's past noon."

"Go eat then," Bucky snaps. It sounds more like  _go fuck yourself_.

"It's beef and noodle today. Mashed potatoes. Corn." Steve finishes up with the kill shot. "Fresh homemade bread."

Bucky throws one final, rumbling punch. "JARVIS, off." Only "off" comes out with an unmistakable Brooklyn accent. Bucky recognizes it with a dismissive head shake.

"What was that back there?" Bucky hotly demands. His voice and face are angry. "Why invite me to that?"

Steve isn't ready to say  _because I thought you'd have my back_ , because he damn well knows that Bucky  _had_. Steve just hadn't liked it too much.

"You and Nat back on?"

Bucky blinks at him owlishly, a question written on his face. Steve thinks the phrase these days is  _for fucking real?_  He answers, though. "No. Maybe. I don't know. It felt—dirty."

"It smells dirty," Steve says, and loves the eye roll it earns him. "Trainee, huh? In your gym on Six, then?"

"Steven," Bucky warns.

"Go take a quick shower—five minutes quick, not your quick—and let's get lunch."

Bucky complains, "Is food all you think about? Jesus Christ," but he gets his ass moving in the right direction.

"Well, and your sex life," Steve helpfully corrects. "Does she know you call her a trainee?"

"I shouldn't've pulled you out of the river," Bucky mutters.

Too soon.

***

At 0703, Quinjet Six makes its final descent toward the scarred reds and beiges of the Atacama desert outside Antofagasta. Still dark, they race the exposure that comes with the rising sun.

Sharon yawns. Herron, a tag-along trainee, yawns after her. Barnes judges them both: they've only been in the air since 0400.

Sharon sets the jet down in the flat conflux of three wide canyons, in the relative cover behind a tall bluff. It's a smart place: once the sun comes out, the jet will be eclipsed by shadow for most of the day.

Barnes unstraps first and heads to the back of the jet, popping open overhead compartments as he goes. "Herron, grab the bags."

It's not that Herron's bad. It's that Herron's slow. At everything he does. There's a little bit of younger Steve in him: all the earnest motivation and drive, but without ability. Back home, Barnes has his file earmarked for rejection – with recommendation for low-level analyst work, a kind favor.

Barnes lowers the ramp and waits for Sharon to exit first. He follows behind her into the cool, dark morning, listening as Herron rustles and wrestles with three light bags. The nice thing about the Atacama Desert in July is that it tops out at 70-something Fahrenheit on a hot day.

His eyes cut through the dark. He identifies the sparse landmarks Steve had marked out on the topo maps, orienting himself to the flat, barren environment. The not-nice thing about the Atacama Desert is that it's a fucking desert: arid plains for long stretches of kilometers, dotted with the bare remnants of hundreds of years of human mineral mining, weird buildings, and failed projects.

Following SOP, Sharon goes right and he goes left, sweeping the perimeter at a 100-meter radius around the jet.

"Reliant, Blackbird, radio check."

"Blackbird, Reliant, I read you five," Barnes replies. Besides Sharon in his ear, everything here is quiet, serene, empty. "Blackbird, Blue, radio check."

Herron doesn't reply.

Barnes stops walking and glances over his shoulder, back at the jet. He can make out its wing peeking out from above the bluff. He doesn't see Herron, who's probably still putzing around in the cargo hold.

He's almost amused by this: one of the softer sides of life, these days. Barnes explains, "Herron, you're Blue. Blue Heron. Get it?"

A few silent seconds pass. Barnes puts his hand on his sidearm but leaves it in its thigh holster, and turns full around, eyes on the jet.

"Blackbird, help your friend. I'll finish the sweep," Sharon radios.

Protocol mandates that he draws his sidearm, so he does: safety on, finger off the trigger. He walks toward the jet.

To the east, the half-crescent sun hovering above the horizon burns the sky orange. Long shadows stretch across the pebbled beige sand. Early predators dart through the sky, casting quick veils across the ground.

Behind the bluff, the jet stands silent. As he passes the front, Barnes looks through the tinted cockpit windshield and sees large, dark splotches on the backside of the tempered glass. He doesn't know what they could be.

He clicks the safety off, rounds the nose, and crouches down, listening while his instincts do the hearing.

"Reliant, Blackbird, report."

He doesn't respond. That alone will get her here. If it's nothing, great: it's nothing. If it's something, great: they're both here.

He doesn't hear Herron. He doesn't hear anything.

Barnes moves toward the tail, then comes around it, sidearm raised at thin air. The cargo ramp is up. The three bags from the overheads wait in a neat row. Herron's not here.

His screaming instincts stifle his better judgment.

Her sidearm drawn and half-raised, Sharon calmly walks up to the tail, appraises the non-situation, and lifts her eyebrows at him. "Scared of the dark?"

"I can't find Herron," he says, voice low. He shifts the aim of his sidearm away from her but doesn't lower it.

Something in the air prickles his nerves; something slight, something he can't quite identify.

"He's probably taking a piss." She gestures her sidearm toward the jet. "And his radio's probably in  _there_. Great training."

With his next breath he catches it: sickening metallic.

Herron's dead.

And they're – perfect prey, in the perfect spot. Easy pickings in someone's kill zone.

Barnes grabs Sharon's vest and pulls her toward him. Two months has built a fair amount of trust, and today she proves that by letting him direct her around the side of the jet, back toward the nose, without a word of argument.

The normal instinct is to run into the clearest point of egress: away from the tail, out into the open desert, not toward the nose. He never expected someone else to anticipate that.

A soft, controlled  _thud_  behind them is the only presage to the blinding, minty-cold blue that engulfs them.

The jet vanishes. The dim darkness flashes to daylight. The sand becomes packed, brown dirt spotted with gray rock.

A dense fog hangs low. A Faraday dome stretches above their heads, its once-was white girders dirty gray. Skeletal buildings rise into the sky, their rusted-orange iron beams exposed and hollow. Four other buildings stand brick and solid—three of them windowless, one with a charred hole in its side. In the distance, massive radio, satellite, and microwave towers shadow the landscape, multi-story mooring brackets next to them.

The Cosmodrome.

"We have to—"  _Go_.

It's an invisible island in the Siberian Arctic, and there's nothing here to leave in: no jet, no boat, no anything. His heart jumps out of his chest and dives into the sea. It's not a half-bad idea.

"Is this…?" Sharon wonders with a very appropriate amount of trepidation.

Barnes' lungs shrivel into a tightly-wadded ball. His hand drops from her vest, nowhere safe to drag her to.

Years ago, his fight-flight-freeze reflex hadn't existed: it was all and only fight. Fight everything, everyone, anything, something, nothing. Somewhere along the way, he'd relearned flight, no shame in running. Today, he's mastered the useless skill of  _freeze._

Sharon grabs his arms, her face staring up at his. "Barnes?"

He doesn't think his heart is beating. He can't breathe. He can't move. He can't speak.

He wants to die.

Pain explodes in his neck. He doesn't have time to calculate the angle of attack or aim his weapon. In a split second, he becomes woozy and dry-mouthed, his legs buckling and body collapsing despite the strength of Sharon's hands.

Barnes hits the ground on his knees, his eyes dragging closed, his brain shutting down. His sidearm drops from his limp hand.

Sharon grabs the handhold on the back of his tactical vest and pulls, his body a dead weight and too much of a burden. He yearns to yell at her to  _run, go, leave_.

Another spot of pain bursts in his right arm and then in his right thigh. He tries to touch the spots with his left hand, but it's either too heavy or malfunctioning, because he can't –

He knows this. He knows this. He knows this.

It's HYDRA. It's always HYDRA.

His hands won't move. He can't draw his weapon. He can't shoot himself. He can't scream for Sharon to shoot him.

He can't.

Sharon vanishes, gone, and he falls onto his stomach, the darkness behind his eyelids tilting sideways. The frozen, raw dirt smells old, familiar, and itches his cheek.

_No, no, no._

Slow, sluggish footsteps crunch over the tundra.  _Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch._

He can't move.  _He can't mo—_

Something hard digs into his stomach and pushes his body over. He thinks of Becca's ugly ragdolls and how their arms and legs flipped and flopped, boneless, shapeless, powerless.

The indomitable lure of sleep incinerates his fear for himself, his worry for Sharon, his racing thoughts, his everything. It pulls him down into a deep, dark water, down, down, down, even when an impossible voice slips around him, as good as a garotte.

"What am I going to do with you,  _milli moi?_ "

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 10: In the Dead of Night._

/***/

Rogers runs toward the doors.

Natasha sprints in the opposite direction, as she shoots at the examiner’s office window. She crashes through the splintered glass a moment before the grenade explodes. 

She skids across the floor on her right shoulder, bangs into a filing cabinet, spins to her feet, and launches herself right back out into the morgue.

Natasha hardly sees the spickets of water shooting from the ceiling, or the charred papers flitting through the air, or even the chunks of concrete plummeting to the ground.

In the hallway, she zeroes in on Rogers’ retreating back. Her bullets haven’t done him any favors: he’s slow, for him at least, and spilling blood.

Legs pumping, she tears down the hallway, holding her breath against the thick, acerbic smoke.  From inside a pocket, she pulls out a taser disc – one made specifically for Rogers, for the worst of times after Death Valley.

This qualifies.

In a single, fluid motion, he stops at the elevator shaft, punches through the metal doors, and rips them aside.

Natasha throws the disc, satisfied as it sinks barbs into his neck and sizzles blue shocks of electricity across his body.  The veins in his forehead and neck bulge, his body freezing upright, agony written into his face.

Mercy is for fools.

Two meters away, still at full speed, she leaps into the air, spins, and double-kicks him: one foot in the face, the other in the chest. While he sails through the air, she nimbly lands on the balls of her feet and tips of her fingers.

Rogers lands hard on his back, cratering into the pretty granite floor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is the darkest of dark.
> 
> Musical inspiration for this chapter: "Hollow Talk" by Choir of Young Believers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepnIuRbYF4); "Blackbird" by the Beatles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Man4Xw8Xypo)
> 
> Thank you for reading! I appreciate it.


	10. In the Dead of Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> HYDRA has captured Barnes and Sharon: no one knows where they are, and no one will ever, ever find them. Back at base, HYDRA brings war to SHIELD's doorstep, with one goal: to burn SHIELD alive, once and for all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Major character death. Major character injury. Self-harm/self-injury. Torture. Interpersonal violence. Dub-con. Non-con.

Part One: Death

"You kill this person, you sleep. Five minutes to decide. Five days, if you don't. And it dies, anyway. Don't you want to sleep?"

He's died before. He knows what to expect. He only hopes it's for keeps.

Footsteps circle, away from him, then stop. He can't see and can barely breathe, sucking in warm, linty vapors through suffocating black-out fabric.

His left arm is a dead, oppressive weight by his side. He's stopped trying to pull his right arm loose. The bones are broken, skin mangled raw, tendons and ligaments hanging free: might as well be a boneless sack of skin, for all it's worth.

Steve's voice: "What…"

 _Let him go._ If his throat wasn't broken, he'd scream it.

"Kill him, and it all stops. One minute. Don't you want to sleep?"

Steve, again: "I – What?"

The gunshot isn't as loud as it should have been. He feels it in the way there's no breath left in his body, in the way the world tumbles out of control. He's on the ground before he knows it, his body prickly cold except for the warmth spreading through his chest.

He doesn't hear the next two gunshots, but the world bleeds deep blue inside of a second.

Rolling, white clouds are stacked like glaciers. Branches of crinkling, orange leaves rattle overhead. Pink cherry blossom petals float between bursts of warm wind. Small songbirds flutter and sing, while too-long blades of green grass scratch his bare arms.

That's not right.

He sits up to rows of vibrant red tulips, a black wrought-iron fence, and a gray cobblestone pathway. The path winds around to a black luminaire and a brass drinking fountain. Shakespeare Garden.

His left hand and arm are made of real skin, real pores, real everything.  _How_.

"You loved this place."

Immediately, he matches the impossible voice to a name: "Anna?"

It makes sense: he's dead. This is death. Nicer than he'd ever thought it'd be. Kinder.

He stands up and turns, seeing her red curly hair, brown eyes, dark freckles. The day they'd met, she'd put him down flat on a gym mat, his nose dripping blood. She'd married him, then died of pneumonia.

"I'm dead," he says, not bothering to hide the hope in his voice, only then remembering:  _Natasha, Sam, and Steve._

They're still there.

And he's here.

 _No_.

Anna peers at him, curiosity burning in her eyes. Those eyes turn upward toward the blue sky, and he follows her gaze, seeing a flash of yellow-orange overtake the blue. He doesn't see her eyes burn with that same color.

Suddenly, his body feels cold, as if wrapped in placid ocean water – then minty. He sucks in a deep breath, inadvertently taking in the sweet scents of the flowers and the crisp earthiness of the autumn leaves.

The midday sun warms his face. The lukewarm breeze slips around his skin.

"Save them," he pleads – not knowing if this is real, who she is, what this is, but – They can't stay there. "Please."

The left side of his upper body aches, deep and painful, like always. His lips feel cracked. His throat burns. Familiar terror squeezes his body: this isn't real, and it's not over. It's waiting—

The sunny, blue-sky garden, with its leaning, red tulips, its wafting, pink cherry blossoms, and its rolling orange leaves fade.

In their place, a cold, hard lab table. He can't move. He thinks metal bites into his ankles and right wrist.

He doesn't feel like he's been shot. His right arm, though, still feels like it's been broken. And his throat – it's nearly impossible to breathe, and he sucks in scrapes of desperate breaths through a swollen windpipe.

He can still think. He still knows his name:  _James Barnes, James Barnes, James Barnes_. He still remembers:  _Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam –_

He can see. Above him, encased in black granite, the tip of a twirling helix. Yellow-orange electricity sizzles and arcs, tendrils reaching toward him, before fading away, before the helix calms to a dead stop.

Something covers his eyes, and a burning sting slithers through his body, taking him down, down, down.

Until a vaguely familiar, intensely calm male voice says: "I fucking hate you. I want you to scream."

He can't move, can't see, but he can feel: left arm dead, right arm gouged and shattered. And he does: he screams and screams, with every pinprick and endless searing scald of jet fuel that ignites every nerve.

The cuts don't matter. The burns don't matter. But those pinpricks… He screams, for days or hours or months or years or seconds or decades.

Until: "You kill this person, you sleep. Five minutes to decide. Five days, if you don't. And it dies, anyway. Don't you want to sleep?"

Footsteps circle, away from him, then stop. He can't see and can barely breathe, sucking in warm, linty vapors through suffocating black-out fabric.

The same as before, as if they've found a way to roll back time. Either he's insane, or they have.

"Kill him, and it all stops. Don't you want to sleep?"

He hears bare skin slapping against concrete and ragged wheezes mixing with his own. Through the fabric, he can smell his own blood and his own burnt skin.

A joint socket  _cracks_  and  _pops_. The fabric peels away, and cold, welcome air breezes against his face. He sees Steve: a haze, a blur, a head of blond hair, and a body of – bad, bad things.

 _Let him go_. He would scream it, if he could. They hadn't fixed that part of him.

Steve's head drops, body collapsing. "I'd give anything, Buck. I'd give anything. It all."

They have Steve.  _Steve_.

_I'm sorry. I love you. I –_

The gunshot isn't as loud as it should have been. He feels it in the way there's no breath left in his body, in the way the world tumbles out of control. He's on the ground before he knows it, his body prickly cold except for the warmth spreading through his chest.

He doesn't hear the next two gunshots, but the world bleeds deep blue inside of a second.

Glacier clouds. Bright red tulips. Singing songbirds. Cobblestone and cherry blossoms. A luminaire and a brass fountain.

Anna.

Barnes sinks two flesh hands into too-long, scratchy grass and pulls up two handfuls of blades. Defiant, angry, resigned, he looks at her. "What is this?"

"You loved it here," she says.

"I came here  _three times_ ," he argues, defiant and dismissive.

Once with his mom. Once with Anna. Once after Anna died, with Steve. Then the War. Then everything after.

Curiosity burning in her eyes, Anna peers at him, then sits next to him in the grass. She plucks a single long blade – and that blade dissolves into a puff of yellow-orange light.

He watches it happen, a little speechless, a little confused, a little scared. And he remembers: the sizzling yellow-orange tendrils of the helix.

 _Are you_ … He doesn't know how to say it, without sounding crazy.

Her eyes turn upward toward the blue sky, and he follows her gaze again, seeing a flash of yellow-orange overtake the blue. He still doesn't see her eyes burn with that same color.

His body feels cold, as if wrapped in placid ocean water – then minty. The left side of his upper body aches, deep and painful, like always. His lips feel cracked. His throat burns. Familiar terror squeezes his body.

The sunny, blue-sky garden, with its leaning, red tulips, its wafting, pink cherry blossoms, and its rolling orange leaves fade.

In their place, the same cold, hard lab table. He can't move. Metal bites into his ankles and right wrist.

He doesn't feel like he's been shot. His right arm and throat are broken. It's still nearly impossible to breathe, with that broken windpipe and all.

He can still think. He still knows his name:  _James Barnes, James Barnes, James Barnes_. He still remembers:  _Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam._ They haven't taken that yet – but their new machine… He thinks it could take it all.

He can still see. Above him, encased in black granite, the tip of that twirling helix machine. Yellow-orange electricity sizzles and arcs, those tendrils reaching closer toward him, before fading away, before the helix calms to a dead stop.

Something covers his eyes, and a burning sting slithers through his body, taking him down, down, down.

Until a vaguely familiar voice—the same one as before—says: "You know – I don't think I'll ever get tired of this. I love the sound of your scream. You deserve this."

He can't move. Can't see. But he can feel: left arm dead, right arm gouged and shattered, and he screams and screams with every pinprick.

The cuts don't matter. The burns don't matter. Only the pinpricks.

Until: "You kill this person, you sleep. Five minutes to decide. Five days, if you don't. And it dies, anyway. Don't you want to sleep?"

_Again._

The last time he'd gotten to the end of this rope, he'd killed a room of kids. He remembers breaking, shattering, wanting it all to stop more than he wanted to live or to die. He'd be their anything, if they'd only  _stop_.

This time, he doesn't know how long it's been, but he remembers it all.

He wants to die.

He wants Steve to do it, to end it.

"Kill him, and it all stops. Don't you want to sleep?"

The sound of dragging. The hood peeling off, ushering a cool rush of air. Steve, inscrutable through the bruises, exhaustion, dirt, and damage. His eyes, though…

Barnes pushes splinters of words through his broken, raw throat: "'l-l-lease. S-t…'eve."

He wants Steve to end it. To kill, and destroy himself doing it.

There'll never be an ending, where Steve didn't ruin his life with a serum. There'll never be an ending, where there's a way out of this. There'll never be –

Steve twists away and vomits empty stomach acid.

" _Please_."

It's not selfish: it's the only certain future.

Steve will kill him, and Steve will end. No one's coming to stop it.

That voice says: "Don't you want to sleep?"

A knife clatters to the floor. Steve's fingers spider step to it, then wrap around the hilt.

Barnes begs, "P-pl-ease."

Fire torches his thro—

He sees the gleam of a knife and hears the roar of his friend, his brother, the last thing right from a world long gone.

Then a blue sky. Tulips. Cobblestone. Anna.

He lays in the grass and waits for the yellow-orange pulse to wash across the blue.

"They won't stop," Anna warns.

He doesn't answer. This place doesn't fix anything: it's only somewhere to wait.

It all happens again, over and over and over and over.

Steve kills him faster each time, and he watches as HYDRA violently, brutally, mercilessly chisels Steve into their dream.

He watches them hit Steve, scream at Steve—"Not the head! How many fucking times do you need to be told?!"—and whittle Steve away into a hard, brittle shadow.

He watches Steve die, the world hollowed.

_CRACK!_

Stars sizzle in his peripheral, a short fuse igniting splinters of dark agony deep inside his forehead. They never fix that, and he knows why. He knows when they do, he won't be dead – but he'll be gone, and he hopes that someone good is left to kill him for keeps.

"It only gets worse," Anna warns again.

Before his throat burns again, before his arm aches again, before he wakes up to a helix machine and its yellow-orange sizzles, he turns his head and regards whatever is pretending to be Anna.

"Save them."

The garden melts away. He stares up at the helix machine, watching the yellow-orange sizzles and tendrils sputter away. Something covers his eyes, and a burning sting slithers through his body, taking him down, down, down.

Until: a cold restraint locks around his right wrist. Supporting hands disappear, and his body jerks down two, three inches, and he can't support his own weight. His left arm slumps limp and useless at his side, a dead weight. His body entirely, agonizingly rests on his wrist.

The stale air is prickly cold against his bare skin.

A vaguely familiar voice, the same one as before says: "'Kay, Cap. You watch me have mine. Then he's all yours. Remember what he did to you."

His left knee explodes, a burst of shattered agony leaving no room for recovery.

His right knee next: the same pain, the same way.

Pain explodes in his throat: black vision painted red, the sound of his own wheezing, the sick crackles of a trachea broken in half again. He can't breathe. Can't breathe. Can't breathe.

Blood and bone splatter against his face, his numb right hand rendered useless in an instant. He falls into the darkness, deeper, deeper, down, down, down, and he closes his eyes, his right one twitching, hoping it will take him, take him, take him away.

He knows who the vaguely familiar man is. He knows why. He knows from when and where. It makes sense, when death  _doesn't fucking matter._

"Oh, no. No, no. No sleeping," the man says.

He tries to open his eyes to see the face, but his eyes won't do that right now. He feels his right eye twitch. His left arm is dead; his right, rattling a chain when he tries to move it, agony shooting up his arm.

"You might not remember me. But I remember you. How much you failed. What you did. That's okay. Captain Rogers here will help you. Right, Cap?"

A different voice speaks: female, accented, familiar. In his mind's eye, he sees her red lips, curled brown hair, and piercing brown eyes. "Answer, Steve."

He remembers everything about forever: Ebbets Field, the helicarrier, Coney Island and an Orion ice truck, Walt Murray, Frankfurt, Poland. None of it matters, not here, not ever again.

Steve answers. "You bet."

Days or weeks or decades pass. They get to the end – more than once.

Each time, he gets to the Garden.

Each time, he gets hung back up.

All he knows is damp, cold, concrete, and blood, while Steve obligingly does everything he's told to do.

He hopes Sam is dead but never learns that he is.

He hopes Natasha is dead and soon learns that she's not.

He hopes they put him back under the helix machine, one last time, and takes this—all of this—out of his fucking head. They can make him into anything, if they'll do that one thing for him.

"It's been fun," that familiar male voice says. "Lucky for you, you have a date with your little bitch."

His right arm, still numb, falls, and he crumbles to his shattered knees, something like a sound escaping his throat. He intends to fall over onto his stomach, and that's what he does.

He opens his eyes but can only hazily see what's right in front of him: the floor, and blood, old and new together. He can't see in his peripheral anymore, and his right eye twitches, everything numb and gone.

Somebody rolls his body, the world tipping over. Blond hair and blue eyes bleed into view; they belong to a face he'd once known forever. A stranger, now.

He thinks of Poland. Of a chance. Of relief and stupid happiness, worn by a different face.

He scrapes breath through his windpipe and forces something like words through his crushed windpipe and broken jaw: "I love you."

The only voice Barnes has left is crackles and rasps. Even those thin, croaked words spark fire in his lungs and stretch apart the dry, bleeding cracks in his lips.

He can't hear himself say it. He doesn't even know if he had, until Steve steps in close, once-was love turned to hate; once-was conviction turned to viciousness; and one-was hope turned to dark anger.

Towering above him, Steve calmly—calm like the eye of a vicious, swirling storm—states, "Don't bother. The only world is without you in it."

His cracked lips and cracked jaw barely let him beg, "Then kill me."

"Not this time, Buck. Orders."

The thick-soled, black boot that soars toward his head betrays the swirling calm of that voice. He doesn't feel anything, nothing left to feel as the world tilts, gravity dissipating into too-thin, fiery air that burns his eyes and scorches his throat.

The world bleeds black inside of a second.

Part Two: Love

Every thirty seconds, his right lateral palpebral ligament flutters. A pinpoint light shines into each of his eyes, one by one. He doesn't flinch.

"Pupils unequal and nonreactive. Tremor identified in right eye. Another absence seizure."

The fingers that touch his hand look cold. He doesn't look at the needle sliding into the IV catheter secured to the knot of angry red skin on the top of his hand. Two fingers snap close to his face. He still doesn't flinch.

His wrist, limp by his black-clad thigh, is yellow, purple, black, green, red, blue – so many colors, so many shades, like someone has taken a thick paint brush to his skin.

Her skin is better – gray-like, ashen, but not so bruised, not anymore.

"MRI and EEG results are indicative of another stroke. Eye exam is positive for optic nerve swelling. Likely SDH."

Nothing good. He's damaged beyond the repair of his serum.

He's sitting on an autopsy table; his bruised hand rests by a drain. Under the table, a clean silver bucket sits poised to collect waste. For a moment shorter than a flicker of a candlelight, she worries – but he's too valuable. He's always been too valuable.

That doesn't explain the new scars.

She looks at his eyes and sees how they deftly follow the nurse's. More of him is left than they think.

"Record the findings. Proceed with euthanasia as planned."

Each word falls harder than the last. She's buried alive by them. Foolishly, her heart pounds. Her stomach writhes. Time stagnates, thick, slow, and unmoving.

He's too valuable. He's—

His right lateral palpebral ligament flutters.

Her head jerks, heart fighting brain fighting conditioning fighting fragments of another life.

A black combat knife—his, she knows; it used to be his—is handed to her, hilt-first. From behind her, two faceless soldiers step to her flanks, weapons locked and loaded.

"Slit the throat. Don't make a mess."

Her expression schools to show nothing. In her relaxed hand, the weight of the perfectly balanced knife settles easily. And he –

He's watching  _her_  eyes, as if he can still see straight through her. He isn't fearful or angry or preparing to fight for his life.

His right lateral palpebral ligament flutters.

She walks forward, slips her fingers through his hair, and tilts his head back. The bruised green and knotted-red skin of his neck pulls taut. His eyes slip past her.

They tried to take his memories and damaged his brain, she can only guess. His death means nothing. She tells herself those things and presses the blade against his throat. Something like love won't let her draw blood.

His eyes meet hers again, and he whispers "please," with the barest of breath pushing the word barely past his lips.

His voice has always surprised her. No matter if he was providing training guidance, criticism, or instructions for how to best kill, he always sounded the same: even, calm, and mild. She remembers that she wished she could listen to him talk for hours.

The damage can heal. The proof is in his eyes and in that plea.

Love is for children, but, for him, she would whisper day and night.

She releases his hair.

She spins around, the blade of the knife slicing cleanly through the necks of the doctor and nurse. As the soldiers begin to fire their weapons at her, she backflips to avoid the barrage of bullets, lands, and darts toward the soldier on the left.

She takes the soldier's rifle into her hands, pushes it up, twirls herself up his body, and breaks his neck between her thighs. She shifts her center of gravity, drops to the ground, and propels the dead soldier over her body and into that of the second one. She spirals to her feet, leaps toward the second soldier, tears off his helmet while pivoting behind him, and cuts his throat.

Incidentally, she has made quite the mess.

She turns toward the autopsy table. He's laying sideways on it, right hand clenched over his face.

Head tilted, she realizes that much more of him is left than he had let show. " _Milli moi_."

Through splayed fingers, he looks to her, unlikely pain flickering through his expression, creating tension in his jaw and uneven, labored breaths. Much more of him is damaged than he had let show.

"Töte меня… No. Это…"

The corner of his right eye spasms.

 _Kill_  in German.  _Me_  in Russian.  _That_  in Russian.

She watches him squeeze his eyes closed, struggling to find a coherent language, pushing through pain.

He doesn't belong here. Once, he might have, but they've destroyed him.

Time is limited, and, in these moments, she's already decided. She takes each of the soldiers' sidearms, goes to him, pulls him up, and takes his right wrist into her hand. She wraps the fingers of his right hand around one of the weapons.

"Can you shoot?"

The corner of his right eye spasms. With stiff, sluggish difficulty, he grasps the sidearm, tightly enough to carry it. He may not be able to aim or fire it.

She combs her fingers through his hair, running her short, broken fingernails and their chipped-red paint across his scalp. His eyes close in relief, as he leans forward and plants his forehead against her chest.

"Kill me."

"No. On your feet."

He complies. Like his hand, his right leg is weak and barely responsive, with hardly enough strength to support his weight. His left buckles, though she easily catches him. His eyes turn red and watery, breaths heavy and ragged.

"Walk," she orders, and he does, his weight supported by her.

As they advance into the hallway, it quickly becomes apparent that he will be useless in any combat situation. His gait is slow and painstaking, right leg nearly dragging, and his eyes are unfocused, the right eyelid twitching again.

She should kill him, like he wants. But.

Once, "but" never existed in her vocabulary. Situations did not come with emotions. People did not come with attachment. Missions, orders, facts were all that she considered. He had broken her, and he's breaking her now.

Without him, the world is empty.

She leads them down two floors, silently killing personnel and soldiers as she goes. He keeps the sidearm in his hand, unused, as his gait becomes their albatross – too slow, too uneven.

Decided, she opens a door, then another, and, finally, another. It opens to a dark, deep, disused storage closet filled with dust and old equipment. She leads him into it and settles him in the farthest corner.

"Stay here. I'll be back."

Eyes closed, he answers, "Kill me," in another mismatched patchwork of different languages.

She considers taking the sidearm from him; but, if discovered here, he'd be otherwise defenseless.

"I'm getting SHIELD," she says, something like a promise. "Stay alive until then."

His eyes open, foolish hope shining within them. "Sam?"

Sam is dead by Steve's hand, and his body left to rot inside a room under a different desert.

"Yes," she lies. "Stay alive until then. I'll be back."

She leaves him there with his sidearm, trusting that he'll stay alive for the promise of a long-dead friend.

She goes down another level, knowing exactly where to find the communications room. She kicks open the locked door and enters with her sidearm raised.

 _Bang!_  One dead.

 _Bang!_  Two dead.

"Protect the chip! The chip!"

 _Bang!_ Three dead.

 _Bang!_ Four dead.

 _Bang!_ The last, the one yelling about a chip, dies in his rolling chair, near a large black vertical rack.

The room is small and hot. Large fans do little else but circulate body odor and metal-tinged, stagnant air. A desk partitioned into quarters takes up most of the room, now covered in blood and bodies. Server racks with a rainbow of flashing lights stretch along the back wall.

Against the wall to her right, a horizontal communication console spans the length of the room, while vertical communication consoles pack in from mid-wall to ceiling.

Perfect.

She goes to the horizontal console and pushes away a body with her foot. The beauty of HYDRA being SHIELD for so long is that their equipment all works the same.

She remembers the universal distress frequency, and she communicates an old distress code using it. On the console, the only indication that she has done anything is a pulsing, blue LED light under white letters that spell "distress."

SHIELD will receive it, and SHIELD will come.

Finished with that, she kicks away the rolling chair with the lolling body on it, and approaches the vertical, upright rack that person had so desperately guarded.

Head cocked, she considers what she sees: new, modern, technologically advanced. Inset into the rack, a transparent glass alcove holds a rectangular black chip, unmarked and unnamed. She opens the alcove, disconnects the chip, and plucks it free.

Every console in the room flashes red. Digital panels flash "warning: system error" messages in red pixel letters. Alarms blare.

She smiles. Collateral.

Coolly composed, she walks up a level and to the supply room where she'd left him. She finds him lying on the floor, right arm wrapped around his head, cold sidearm still in his hand.

" _Milli moi_."

"Sam," he responds.

"Soon," she lies again.

She squats down, takes his left hand, and slips the chip into his palm. "Make a fist."

The plates of his arm shift erratically, while his fingers bend and move without purposeful function. She helps: squeezing the fingers into as tight a fist as she can manage.

"Squeeze," she instructs. He still can and does. "Keep that fist. Tell SHIELD you have something important."

"Sam…" He opens his eyes and looks at her, eyebrows so humanly squashed together. "Steve."

What a wasted opportunity.

What a wasted life.

She sits on the dusty floor next to him. "Sleep," she instructs, and even lets him rest against her shoulder. She keeps her sidearm poised and ready, while her other hand, by habit alone, pets his sweaty hair.

Minutes pass. Those minutes turn to an hour and then nearly to two hours.

Spinning klaxons high on the wall bathe the room in dim red and consume it with a shrieking alarm.

He curls into a ball, right arm wrapped around his head. His body slides from her shoulder onto the floor, where he presses his face into old dust.

It may be the base is on lock-down, or it may be that the base commander has appropriately decided to destroy it. If the latter, they'll both die: there isn't a fast-enough way out of the base, not with him.

She has to stop it from happening – to make sure he lives, to keep her world safe.

"Keep that fist," she repeats. "Stay here."

He doesn't respond, but his left fist remains tight, and his right hand keeps ahold of the sidearm.

She walks into the hallway, shoots a handful of sentry soldiers, and proceeds down a floor. She kills as she goes, replacing her expended weapon with those carried by her victims – a lesson taught to her in the Red Room.

Ten meters from Operations—the nerve center of the base—she never sees it coming.

Behind and before her, blast doors slam shut, sealing her inside a tiny compartment of the hallway. Invisible gas hisses from tiny pores in the ceiling.

She stands still, arms at her side, and prepares herself for all that will come next.

He's going to die, buried or burned alive in this base, all of this for nothing.

She's going to the Room again. Inside of it, she hopes they make her right this time, so she won't care how empty the world became today.

 _Это ещё цвето́чки, а я́годки впереди́_ , they say. "These are just flowers; berries will come soon," it means, and that itself means  _this is nothing compared to what is to come._

Part Three: Hate

Orders are to  _"investigate unauthorized activity in sector five of the MD target range. Do not engage."_

Orders are orders, but he can hear a person breathing, their blood thumping. Rogers turns, light scouring between trees and roots to pinpoint the trespasser.

The last three times activity had been detected here, it had been harmless dayhikers meandering through. He doesn't think that's what this is today.

His light intentionally angled elsewhere, Rogers focuses his eyes on a set of upraised roots, where he clearly makes out the tip of a head and two flesh hands.

A heavy stone of disappointment sinks into his stomach.  _It's not him_.

Back at base, Peggy sees what he sees. _"Confirmed. Drop a trip and return to base. We'll get'em that way."_

Without a second thought, Rogers complies. He taps his WASP to trigger a blue portal and steps through, instantaneously arriving in Kozerksa. In the dark of the night, he sees the sentries, rifle barrels glinting in the moonlight.

As always, two faceless soldiers line up on either side of him.

"Welcome back, Captain. The stars are nice tonight."

Automatically, Rogers replies, "I see the shield," the exchange much like a warm, heavy blanket wrapping tightly around his body.

His escort delivers him to a stout, white building. Inside, he alone descends a set of cookie-crumbled, milk-white steps lit by hanging, tungsten bulbs. Down he goes, all the way down, to a square room made of peeling, cracked plaster. He deposits his rifle and shield on the dusty, disintegrated tile floor and plucks out his ear piece.

The bar is hand-crafted mahogany, while the tables and chairs are solid walnut. The piano is an Orion, like his mom's, one of the last of its kind.

Leaned against the bar, Peggy's matte-painted, red lips stretch into a coy smile. A glass tumbler filled with liquor sits in her hand, another close by for him. "We have some time, before our new friend arrives. Care for a drink?"

He's forgotten someone like her with gray hair and a map of wrinkles, written from a life he would never know. Why remember someone who barely existed.

Rogers returns the smile, square-jawed and clear-eyed, as he walks to the Crosley turntable and drops a needle on a scratchy Cole Porter record. "Well, yeah. They're playing our song."

A drink in one hand and Peggy in the other, they dance, hands held in hands, her head nestled on his shoulder, and his cheek pressed into her hair. She smells like Virginia tobacco—like war, like forever.

They dance, and he eats, and he sleeps, and he waits for their visitor.

The visitor comes in the middle of another dance.

_Eeee-OH! Eeee-OH! Eeee-OH!_

Rogers pulls away from Peggy, a sigh dying on his lips. "That's me."

"Well, what are you waiting for?"

With a challenge like that, how could he resist. "Only a kiss."

She obliges, deep and passionate and certainly not too good to be true. At the end, she examines his face and laughs, "You look quite good wearing my lipstick. Pity there's no time to fix it."

Eyebrow raised, he so much doubts her. "Yeah. Pity."

He grabs his rifle and shield, pushes his ear piece into his ear, and races up the cookie-crumble steps. Before he steps outside into the morning light, he swipes the back of his hand over his lips – yeah, he's…

The ground shakes. Soldiers scream. Down the street and around a building, body parts and red mist burst through the air.

As Rogers runs toward the blast, he catches sight of a familiar figure: short dark hair, broad shoulders, thin waist, thick thighs. Two real arms, so it can't be - but he's fast, too fast, dashing down the street, already approaching the railyard and meadow.

It has to be.

It can't be.

But it has to be.

Rogers darts after him, as fast as he's ever been, gaining ground with every step. His footfalls land so hard that the old asphalt shatters under his boots.

" _Captain - pursue until the gorge and get a tracker in him_.  _Make it seem real_ ," Peggy instructs.

 _It's him_.

Orders are orders, but that one not only doesn't make sense, it douses him in gasoline and tosses a lit match at him. She's saying to let him go - after everything - after –

" _I know it's hard. If he wants to be SHIELD, let him be SHIELD, and lead them all back here. All of them, Steve. And then he's yours. I promise you."_

He trusts her more than anything - after everything.

Orders are orders.

Rogers roars through the forest: hopping over logs, crashing through branches, snapping across leaves and logs. The gap between him and Bucky— _it's him, it's him, it's him_ —closes from thirty feet, to twenty feet, to ten feet.

The gorge is only a few more feet ahead.

Rogers plucks an EMP device out of his vest, reaches out with it, easily grabs Bucky's right arm, and yanks him backward. The EMP bursts, nothing but a gentle buzz easing through Rogers' hand.

Sparks throw from Bucky's left arm, fake flesh flickering to silver metal. Bucky's entire body tenses into a rigid line of frozen muscles.

Right here, right now, Rogers could kill him. Could make him feel an ounce of what he had made Steve feel, before Peggy came, again.

" _Steve. You have your orders."_

Rogers is focused somewhere between that voice and his own thoughts, when Bucky spins, drops, pulls a knife, and slashes through Rogers' abdomen.

Caught cleanly off guard, Rogers pitches backward, as Bucky launches off of the cliff's edge, down into the gorge.

Icy fear sludges through his veins. Orders were to -

Rogers leaps toward the cliff, stopping himself a millimeter from the edge, and aims his AR-15 into the river water. Bucky's body is a mere silhouette disappearing under the rushing, choppy surface.

Rogers shoots, again and again and again and again and again, waiting for the blood, for the bobbing body. He shoots until his clip  _clicks_ , expended. He drops it into the water and loads a fresh magazine.

He looks up and down the river, waiting for the body to surface. It doesn't.

" _You landed one. The tracker is active. Return to base."_

Bucky's alive.

Orders are orders, but – it would have been worth it to kill him.

Teeth gritted, jaw locked, Rogers turns away from the cliff. A faceless soldier waits for him some ways back toward the town.

"Welcome back, Captain. The sun is something beautiful today."

Automatically, Rogers replies, "I painted it," the exchange much like a warm, heavy blanket wrapping tightly around his body.

As they walk back toward base, Rogers doesn't check his injury. His thoughts have flipped to blank sheets of paper, nothing yet painted on them. He doesn't worry about the river, or being so close to Bucky, or giving up a rare, fleeting opportunity to do the right and only thing. He doesn't worry about nearly failing the mission.

His escort leaves him at a different white building, and Rogers goes down a different set of cookie-crumble steps. At the bottom, he sits atop a stainless steel exam table and waits for his paper to be painted.

A doctor comes, cuts his jacket and shirt away, and sutures the laceration for what seems like forever. The smell of fresh antiseptic cream pleasantly permeates the stale air.

The doctor leaves, and Rogers lays, staring at the faded mosaic ceiling. Once, it had been blue, like a sky, and, once, it had depicted the Soviet sickle and hammer in blazing orange. Once had been very long ago.

Peggy comes and sits, takes his closest hand into hers, and inserts an IV catheter into his cephalic vein. Her free hand brushes through his hair.

"Tell me what happened, Steve."

With a slow, conditioned pace, he tells her every detail, starting at the beginning and finishing with the end. His hand burns after each sentence, and, like falling dominos, he finds he can't remember the sentences that came before, and, by the end, he can't remember how his abdomen got injured.

"It happened during an earlier mission this week," Peggy explains, always so kind, always so patient. He never thinks to question her. "Does it hurt?"

"No," he answers.

"Good. I'm going to have a mission for you soon. Wash up, eat, and get some rest, all right?"

The shower is ice cold, the water orange with rust, nothing more or less than he needs. Chow is a tasteless gray nutrition block, and, although it leaves him hungry, it's sufficient in calories for the day. It reminds him of the jawbreakers from the War.

His bunk is a single, with a threadbare mattress atop rusted, creaking springs; he has a thin green blanket and sometimes a pillow, if he's earned them. Not today, though, and he wonders if the other mission hadn't gone well. He doesn't ask.

Peggy sits by his head, and his body sucks in her warmth. Her hand runs through his hair. "The stars are nice tonight."

Automatically, Rogers replies, "I see the shield," the exchange much like a warm, heavy blanket wrapping tightly around his body.

"Tomorrow, we move bases, and you have a big mission. You'll have four hours to sleep tonight. Don't waste your minutes," she tells him, and then begins humming a song from long ago.

Four hours is minimum; he earns hours of sleep, too. Once, he'd even gotten to eight but hadn't been able to sleep that long. He doesn't know what he'd done wrong, but he trusts Peggy, and he knows she'll steer him true.

After the Berlin mission, he doesn't even get four hours of sleep.

Inside the new base, somewhere far away from Kozerska, his wrists and ankles magnetically lock to an immovable chair, despite his broken arm and injured knee. He sits for long enough that his injuries excruciatingly heal. An IV pierced into the top of his hand keeps him awake for the entire time.

The light above a nearby table swings back and forth:  _creak-creak, creak-creak_. The foundation's off.

It's hours or days or weeks later that Peggy watches as a man—he's not allowed the name, but he knows the face, and that disparity slips out of his mind, unquestioned—backhands him across the jaw. The man's hand is fortified with thick, crudely armored metal.

Eyes heavy and cold, brain slow and lagging, he feels the pain.

"What were your orders, Cap?"

The man's voice is angry. Peggy's face is angry. They're angry.

His hands shake – nervous, anxious, worried, upset, gutted. Orders were orders, and, if he'd done right, they could be dancing.

"I expect you to god damn answer."

He swallows and makes his voice work. "To bring him in."

Another backhand. His neck  _cracks_ , and he tastes blood. Even without pulling, the maglocks bite into his bare wrists.

"What were your orders?"

He remembers the orders verbatim. "'Orders are to intercept the Winter Soldier in Berlin, attract police and media attention, and then capture the target alive using the Wearable-Access Spatial Portal.'"

"Yes. Good. And?"

His eyes go past the man's and meet Peggy's – not out of defiance, but in acceptance of his failure and readiness to receive the consequences she deems appropriate. "I failed to capture the target using the WASP."

Peggy nods, angry eyes never leaving his. She speaks. "Do you know where the WASP would have taken the target?"

"No, ma'am."

"Where you're sitting. This room. Instead, he's in a hospital, surrounded by Avengers. The open window of opportunity we had is now incredibly limited. We must now deploy another operative." Her eyebrows raise. "Tell me: was it worth it?"

Rogers considers the question. He thinks of the car heaving into Bucky's body. The blood spraying from each bullet wound. How he'd collapsed inside the restaurant, body failing him. The blood from his severed radial artery, from the abdominal wound. Hearing him beg.

His hands shake harder. He can't lie. "Yes."

Peggy's expression becomes blank, as cold as searing-hot fire. She's angrier with him.

She walks forward, a single step in front of the man. Quietly, she tells Rogers, "As weak as he has become, he dismantled you, and you tell me it was worth it. You could have had him in this room, all to yourself. We could have paid him back for everything he's done. We could have danced."

The man interrupts, bitter and vicious. "The helicarriers. What he did to me."

His brain hears "the helicarriers" and "what he did to me," and then lets those thoughts go unconsidered. He remembers killing Bucky in a room, where Peggy rescued him; and he remembers shooting and hurting Bucky in all the places Peggy said – neither had been the right ones to kill or hurt.

He doesn't question any of it.

Peggy straddles him. His body reacts without his permission: pelvis jutting up, yearning to feel her, and his lips lashing out to connect with hers. One of her hands pushes him down; the other one grips his jaw.

She kisses him, hard and long, her lips soft, her skin softer, her scent like home, like war, like forever. When she pulls away, he tries to follow her, yearning for more – but her hand is still tightly wrapped around his jaw.

"Would you like to dance, Steve?"

He can't speak, maybe wouldn't if he could, so he nods.

She smiles, light shimmering across her face; another something Rogers doesn't think to question. "We can, when you understand that it was not worth it. Know that I love you, and that I do this to protect you."

He doesn't know what she means, until she eases from his lap, kneels by his right hand, and plunges a full syringe into the IV.

It starts as a rushing, burning fire that surges through his hand, then up his arm, and, then, as fast as a lightning strike, it ignites  _inside of him_ , inside  _all of him_.

"Always an honor, Cap," the man says.

He screams, while Peggy watches and the man smiles wide, laughing and laughing.

Part Four: War

At 1630, Berlin Team is 30 minutes overdue for check-in, without a distress call. Quinjet Six's transponder is still active, the geographic positioning system pinpointing the jet at its exact last reported position. The comm channel blasts dull static: no response from either Sharon or Bucky.

"Relax. We've all seen them both in action," Maria patronizes, even as she deploys Sam with Quinjet Eight for what they're somehow not calling a SAR.

Sometimes, words don't mean much. Especially those.

Steve accesses the mission profile, reads it quickly once and then again more slowly. It's barely a mission: fly in, take telemetry readings from a couple different points, fly out. A lower level analyst had done the ground work; Steve had signed off on it. Most importantly, Bucky hadn't seen anything wrong.

At Mach 3, Quinjet Eight is still two hours out. In those two hours, the entire world could change.

Steve paces, aware but not caring that Maria's shoulders tense with his every pass of the conference table.  _He_  should be out there; he  _hates_  being in here, useless, powerless, worthless.

Minutes tick by, every one of them without communication from Bucky and Sharon. Every minute brings more desperate certainty: they're in trouble.

The conference room door opens. Natasha pops her head in. "Steve. Let's get food."

Steve looks at the clock: 1702. He should be hungry but can't bear the thought of eating. "No, I'm—"

"Going to get food," Maria insists.

Right. He puts it together: Natasha stayed behind to keep him in check.

In the Cafeteria, the green turkey wrap has no taste. The ranch dressing turns his stomach. He thinks of Emma Russell and loses his appetite altogether. He keeps it in his hands, because he doesn't know what else to do—not while Natasha devours a pasta salad.

Between two bites, she lectures him. "This is the job."

"I know."

But it's not. His job is being Captain America. His job is  _being out there_. His job isn't sitting in Ops with Maria, while his friends—and family—chance death and worse.

Steve drops the wrap onto a plate and pushes it to the middle of the table. He presses his palms into his eyes. "Back during the War, he'd go out with another squad, more and more as time went on. He'd be gone for days, in the middle of warzones and battle fields. It never felt like this."

Back then, they were forever. Nothing could touch them.

"Steve. James is literally the most capable person employed by SHIELD. Sharon is a top-tier agent."

Bucky had been the most capable person used by the SSR, and Sharon had been a top-tier agent in 2016. Hadn't made a difference either time.

Steve presses his palms in deeper, smelling turkey and green bread and  _why is bread green now_.

"I can't lose him again," he says quietly, hoping it gets lost in the murmur of the dinner crowd. "I wonder sometimes."

_If we should leave._

He pulls his hands away from his face, drops them into his lap, blinks, and finds Natasha staring at him. Her fork is speared through a grape tomato and two beige curls of noodles. Her stare – it unnerves him, cuts right through him, could burn him alive.

"This is the only way he's found to quiet his guilt." Her voice lacks its usual control. "Don't take that from him."

"I wouldn't."

"He's moved on, Steve. The world you're thinking of—" Radio programs, books, sketches, a quiet life lived above the collective roar of Brooklyn. "—it doesn't exist for him. You can't go back. He can't afford to."

Yesterday, they'd both stood above his dead body. Often, Steve resents Natasha's piercing insight.

He looks at his turkey wrap, the green bread dented with his fingerprints, and can't believe he's sitting here thinking about  _green bread_ , while they're... "We should be out there."

Natasha takes a bite of pasta. "Maybe. But we're not."

***

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

His muscles buzz with sickeningly familiar drugs. His lungs stretch and seize with every short, jolted breath.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

Something tight and hard digs into his neck and throat. He tries to move his head but that something tight and hard immobilizes his neck against a cold wall.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

He goes to rub his eyes, but he can't move his arm. It's then that he feels hard metal tight around his wrist. Like his neck, it's locked to a wall.

He can't feel his left arm, but he hears it  _whir_  worthlessly.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

Despite the sedatives, his knees ache – he's sitting on them – and his ankles are fastened together.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

It's just like –

He was with Sharon. Once-white steel girders twisted above their heads. In the distance, the foggy silhouettes of four brick buildings loomed in front of satellite towers and rocket moorings.

The Cosmodrome.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

His eyes snap open to a room lit with scalding, bright lights. Uncontrollably, his entire body fiercely jerks forward, a visceral reaction to this island and to this room— _this fucking room_.

His right wrist breaks free for a long two seconds, and then violently slams back to the wall. Likewise, his neck pulls away from the wall, cartilage cracking, face swelling red – but it's free and clear for a solid second – before his head snaps back with a loud, dizzying  _CRACK_.

Maglock restraints. Good to know.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

As stars and sparks rain through his vision, he forces himself to assess his surroundings.

A heavy, gray steel door. A shiny two-way mirror, its glass brand new. A corner once stacked with the bodies of children. Another corner with a dirty, white, blood-stained blanket. A steel table. A needle prick on the top of his right hand –  _not real_.

 _Creak-creak. Creak-creak. Creak-creak_.

The light above the table swings back and forth. The foundation's off.

Less than scared, more than enraged,  _fight_ annihilating  _flight_ and  _freeze_ , every part of him twisted around and sieving through circles, circles, circles, grabbing bits of pieces, pieces, pieces—HYDRA has him, they have him back  _here_ —he screams and tears at the restraints around his wrists with violent, rending, helpless thrusts.

He didn't break their chains last time, and he won't break the maglocks this time. But. He can rip his fucking hand off. That's exactly what his muddled, cloudy brain decides to try to do: screaming, pulling, tearing, through pain, shredded skin, and the telltale sensation of thick liquid running down his hand.

The steel door scrapes open, and a person his brain can't wrap itself around steps inside.

" _Milli moi_ , stop."

He even does.

Red hair. Red lips. Red Room.

He wills his eyes to stop imagining the person he's seeing, but that person doesn't change. Only one person ever,  _ever_ called him that, and she hasn't since – a very long time ago.

His thoughts plod through the residue of the drugs, and he pulls it together enough to remember:  _HYDRA killed Sam and took her from Death Valley_. After a while, he'd figured he was wrong about that.

"You won't break through them." She gives him a half-smile. "Trust me. I've tried."

Natasha sounds almost exactly like herself. Almost is a far cry.

"Whatever you do to yourself, we'll fix it this time. I didn't know before."

 _This time_.  _Before_.

Her eyes dance around the room – at the disgustingly old leftovers, at the frighteningly new additions. "You were broken so badly last time. But they made you here. We can do it again – without the machine. If they use it, you won't remember us."

_Last time._

_Without the machine._

He has no idea what the fuck she's talking about, but a laugh seeps from his constricted throat. "You're gonna do this?  _Natashka_."

Her name was Natalia, but he'd called her that—Natashka. She'd taken it with her to SHIELD. It meant something. It has to still mean something.

Natasha tilts her head, eyes shining, something unhinged ticking on the surface. "I've been looking for you for a long time." She bites the inside of her cheek, red lips pursed. "Rogers will be coming. He's not so happy with you."

She reaches into a pocket with her left hand. He barely cares what she's got in there.

Maybe it's the drugs, but he doesn't fucking follow this. "You know  _Steve_ , but you're gonna do  _this_. How does that wo—"

His eyes lock onto the syringe that comes out of her pocket. It's marked "CvlV4-CRH" in bold, black letters. Every one of his muscles lock up, phantom pains racking his body, his chest already bobbing up and down with uncontained, too-human panic.

With the syringe in her hand, she saunters toward him.

He pulls and pulls at the collar, head snap-snap-snapping, crack-crack-cracking against the wall, while he desperately strains to pull his wrist from the wall. "Nat. Nat. Don't do that. Nat. God damn – Nat! Nat!"

He begs her name, over and over again, even as her hand slips through his hair, grabs a handful, and yanks his head to the side— _how_ —pulling the exposed skin of his neck taut. The needle easily slips through and finds a vein.

Exactly like decades and decades before, it takes no time at all to light up every nerve.

He screams and screams and screams, for days or hours or months or years or seconds or decades, again.

***

Five minutes before the SAR's scheduled check-in, Steve paces in the back of the conference room. He texts Bucky's phone, over and over and over again. He calls it, over and over and over again.

Sam's static-tinged, upset voice cuts through the silent room. Natasha looks up from a paper. Maria stands still.

"Quinjet Six is here and intact. Barnes and Carter are not present. We're searching the immediate area. No joy on comms."

Steve catches the omission: Bucky and Sharon aren't present. They'd had a spare with them today: Herron.

"Herron's body is on the jet," Sam continues. "His blood was used to…draw a face."

Maria never, ever shows it. Never. With that report, her hands white-knuckled around the edge of the conference table, she hunches over, eyes closed. She knows what HYDRA gained today.

When she comes back up for air, she's steel again. "I want to see it."

The live body cam feed that comes through is –

Quinjet Six, perfectly intact. Inside, worse than any of them imagined: Herron's dismembered body, blood splattered and parts splayed throughout the cargo bay. A smiley face, with X's for eyes, painted in red blood across the windshield. A red star smeared next to it.

HYDRA has them.

No amount of breathing or meditating or  _anything_  stops the black out. Steve beats the wall, until even his hand bleeds, thinking and thinking and thinking  _god damn it god damn it god damn it god damn it_.

Natasha's hand clamps his shoulder, her voice bringing him back, down, down, down.

HYDRA has them.

Steve flexes his fingers: they're swollen, lacerated, but he doesn't feel it.

This is real, and HYDRA has them.

He turns from the wall, brushing Natasha away, and points at Maria – who's a statue, encased in skin-colored bronze.

"This is war," he hisses.

"Steve." Natasha's voice and her hand again.

Steve draws his chest up, ready to fight, ready to tear apart the world.

"Romanoff, gear up. Rogers, go to Medical."

Livid, Steve takes a step toward Maria, the edges of his vision crumbling into a blur. "I'm going."

Maria holds her ground, a statue still.

Statues fall.

Natasha steps between them, arms at her side, facing Maria. "I think he should come."

Natasha's head inclines, almost like a plea; Steve wishes he could see her face.

Maria looks past Natasha to him. "Gear up."

On the way downstairs to the hangar bay, Steve can't think past the body parts and blood-smeared designs on the windshield. HYDRA doesn't only have Bucky and Sharon: HYDRA is  _taunting_  them with it.

"Steve, I need you to be you today." Natasha's eyes are hard but earnest. "I need Captain America. Can you be that?"

He doesn't have an answer for her.

In the hangar bay's gear room, Natasha slides on her gauntlets, and Steve takes his shield, ready to be in that jet  _right fucking now_  –

The floor shakes, vibrations skittering through his chest. The lights flicker and turn black, moments before the dim red emergency lights flash to life. Splinters and cracks jolt up the walls, spider legs stretching and reaching up, up, up.

The overhead sprinklers spray ice cold water, while alarm klaxons sting Steve's ears.

Waves of red light graze Natasha's calm, wet face. "We've gotta go."

Thick, black, toxic smoke fills the hallway leading to the hangar. Steve creeps toward the hangar's causeway, closer and closer, heat blistering against his skin and sucking the breath from his lungs.

Natasha coughs, grabs his arm and tries to pull him back, toward the opposite stairwell. "Steve!"

He pulls away from her and pushes forward.

Blind in the midst of the thick smoke, he finds the causeway's blast door: automatically closed, airtight, inches thick. Behind that door,  _pops_  and  _snaps_  join the  _clangs_  of lurching metal, a dull, endless roar, and something more.

Natasha's hand lands on his shoulder. "Steve – you can't go in! It'll destroy the whole base."

Behind the door, he makes out the sound: muffled, inhuman screams. Their people burning alive.

He puts his hand palm-flat against the fireproofed metal. Tiny, miniscule vibrations join the prickles of blistering skin, his skin.

"It's them," Steve realizes.

It's not an accident. It's HYDRA. He  _knows_.

"Steve.  _Now_."

He only goes, because he knows: this is war, and HYDRA is burning them alive, once and for all.

***

For a single, euphoric moment, Barnes is home: sunlight streaming through the window, birds chirping, jet engines roaring, and persistent knocking at the door that fails to lure him from his warm bed.

He thinks through the weekdays – Monday training and Naceri, Tuesday mission, Wednesday training and Naceri, Thursday mission and Naceri again but dinner with Natasha first, Friday off.

It's Friday; he's off, and he owes Maria another Canary. He can't remember how Thursday's mission ended, or how it went with Natasha. While a knife deep-fucks his brain, he thinks and thinks –

Reality comes for him by way of a sizzling, fiery trail of gasoline.

The chemical has run its course, leaving every nerve in its wake blistered and raw. He makes the mistake of curling his fingers, and then squeezing his eyes tight against the wracking, splintering waves of pain those two movements cause.

Every inhalation and every exhalation abrades his lungs and lights new fire inside his chest.

It's exactly the same. It's exactly how they'd cracked him in half, spread him apart, and emptied him out.

It delivers a familiar feeling. Familiar thoughts. Familiar expectations and rules. A long-dead woman's voice whispers  _Seventeen_ in his ear:  _nothing of mine is so useless._  This room and that chemical bring all of it back.

"You wouldn't stop screaming. Rogers has work to do with you."

A series of tight lumps ache on the right side of his forehead. His visual field is that much off in his right eye. He blinks his eyes open and notices the sensation of coagulated crust near his eye. She must have hit him in the head a couple times.

"Fuck you."

Agony trickles down his throat and shoots up his skull. He rides it out, eyes squeezed tight.

The metal collar still bites into his neck, and though it's not locked to the wall, it's locked to the floor. He twitches his right hand and realizes it's locked to the floor, as well, but awkwardly under his back – exactly how he must've fallen.

He thinks his left arm ended up sprawled to the side, while his legs feel spread apart, arranged like an insect in a collection, pinned to a fucking piece of cardboard.

The entire room is a restraint. Smart.

That understanding of what this is and how it's going to go crashes waves of terror through his body. No one good is coming, and he's not leaving.

 _Nothing of mine is so useless_.

He opens his eyes and searches for Natasha. He only sees the tall, bright white ceiling and bits of empty wall, his limited visual field not serving him well.

"Where's HYDRA? Or just you?"

He can't help his slurred, broken speech. His tongue is heavy, his throat is swollen, and his lips are cracked. He's human, and it's human to show it.

Those five words do it again: fire down his throat, knives in his head.

"Rogers will come," she says.

"To kill me. You know that."

"I won't let that happen," she says. "You're one of us."

He closes his eyes again, his own body trembling – ice cold, wrecked. Back in the day, the "after phase" of the poison had lasted for hours, before they would use another syringe and start it all over again. He'd found ways to beg that barely required moving his tongue or lips – "stop" became "op," "please" became "lease," and it didn't fucking matter, because no one was listening.

"Fuck off." Those two words don't require anything; they're  _gold_.

He tries to do something with his left arm. He still can't see it, can never feel it, but he hears it again:  _whirring_ and  _whirring_ , a drill without a screw.

In the silence, he parses and unpacks what she'd said earlier – all the talk about "last time" versus "this time."

The story he'd gotten about the dead version of himself hadn't made a whole lot of sense to him: the bullet in the head, fine, sure, he'd do that. He doesn't think he'd blow up the base  _and then_  kill himself. Not to mention the brain damage Natasha—his Natasha—had told him about. Pieced together with what happens in his own head when he takes a hit, it all snaps into place, crystal clear.

"They wrecked his brain," he says.

Natasha doesn't have anything to say to that.

It hurts so badly to talk, but he has to try. He thinks he can talk her down – before she uses another syringe, before HYDRA comes, before Steve comes.

_No more screams, Seventeen. No more words. No more movement. Breathe._

"You think doing this will protect me from that? From Steve?" He doesn't need her to affirm her fucked up plan. He knows her. "You promised me a bullet."

"You're one of us,  _milli moi_. You've forgotten. You'll remember soon."

She sounds like Rumlow – too far gone.

Bereft, Barnes gives up on her and snickers, "Fuck off and die."

As quick as a spider, she launches into sight. A band around her left wrist glows red, and that red flashes into a bright green when she kicks him in the head. His head rolls with it.

He hears a  _crack_ and then himself groan. Lightning bolts shoot into his brain, splintering, splintering, splintering, and he can't think, the room doesn't spin more than it shakes, and his eyesight flickers in and out.

Her warm body straddles his, low enough to not be a mistake. He forces his drooping eyes to stay open and watches her coolly look him over.

Her bracelet is red again, and his neck is locked in place again.

That's how it works. He has to get close enough to the bracelet –

Her hand settles on top of his pants, easily finding what she's looking for there. His belt's already undone, zipper already unzipped, something creamy wet already –

Hot, icy, shameful, numbing cold prowls down through his chest, around through his stomach, and down into his legs. Under his back, he makes a futile fist, tight enough to split his knuckles, or so it feels.

Her head tilts, painfully like her. Her eyes outline exactly for him what she's going to do. "I've missed you."

The Winter Soldier is too far gone for him to keep the shake out of his voice. "I'm not going to beg you."

She squeezes. " _Milli moi –_ why would you?"

His eyes slide past her red hair, riding a balloon up to the bright white ceiling.

Dugan had gently observed, "You have handprints on your neck." Dugan hadn't mentioned the bite marks, and he hadn't seen the other things. No one had seen that ceiling as much as him.

Not here. Not her. Not again. He sees red: red lips, red hair, red bracelet.

He screams for her, roars for her, and his left arm finds her.

Smarter than a punch, he grabs her hair. The restraint whips straight back down to the floor, dragging her with it. He keeps ahold of the fearful rage, uses it, and brings his arm up again, as high as his screaming will take it, and then lets it get sucked back down.

A syringe sinks into his left thigh, as deep as it can go. Jet fuel ignites, every nerve on fire. Another scream rips from his throat, tearing through his skin, so loud it has right to crumble the walls.

_Nothing of mine is so useless. No more screams, Seventeen. No more words._

At the end of it all, at the beginning of it all, he – James Barnes, Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier – didn't scream anymore. He didn't crumple in a corner. He didn't shake. He didn't beg. He injected it himself and precisely carried out orders, proving that he was theirs.

In this room, with all of their wants and dreams pulsing through his veins, he is that person.

He's exactly what Natasha wants.

He won't beg. He won't scream.

Under his back, he pulls on his wrist, dislocates it, and rips his hand through the restraint. Skin peels and bone breaks and blood spills and he easily reaches to her left wrist, catches it, and squeezes away her bracelet, bone, and veins.

Ankles free to move, he kicks her hard in the chest, sickeningly satisfied as she crunches into the far wall. Clumps of her hair tangle around his left hand.

Expecting HYDRA to storm the room, Barnes zips and buttons up. Fire licks at every nerve, roaring with every movement, but he doesn't let it control him. Eunice and Norman would be proud: he's still got it.

Sick and destroyed, elated and relieved, Natasha extricates herself from the body-sized indentation in the concrete wall, her Widow serum hard at work.

Her smile leers. "Would you like to play a game?"

HYDRA doesn't come, but she does, violent and vicious.

***

Side-by-side with Steve, Natasha bolts up the stairwell, exiting on the ground level atrium.

The lights are off, the three-story foyer lit only by dim reds. Smoke hangs thinly in the air. Gunfire, voices, and screams echo down from the upper three levels.

The hangar bay wasn't an accident. The entire base is under attack.

Without any warning, Steve clotheslines Natasha in the neck, pushing her backward into the stairwell's door. She hits hard enough that her back depresses the crash bar, and Steve pushes them through with enough force and speed that they skid down the stairs.

A fiery, scorching roar follows them. The door shears from its hinges, lands mere inches from her head, and crashes down the stairs. Glass shards, bits of tile, paper, and concrete hail against Steve – his body serving as a human shield for hers.

It's over that quickly.

"Are you o—"

" _Go_ ," Natasha commands.

Steve speeds back up the steps, Natasha right behind him – until she hears a distinctive  _CLANG_  from further down the stairs.

HYDRA may still be down there. All they have down there is –

The morgue. Barnes.

Before Steve gets to the door opening, she reaches out and grabs his shoulder. When he turns, she silently hand motions where she's going and where she expects him to go.

He signals acceptance and rushes into the destroyed, smoke-filled foyer, shield at the ready.

Natasha turns and cautiously descends the stairs. The lower she goes, the smokier the stairwell becomes. Subfloors Two and Three are the closest to the hangar bay and bring the worst of the sooty, gasoline-tinged smog.

She holds her breath and blindly powers down the steps, eyes watering and stinging.

Natasha exits on Subfloor Four outside Archives. She closes the door silently, presses her back against the wall, and slinks toward the morgue.

It's quiet. Nothing seems out of place or threatening. For a moment, only a moment, she doubts herself: what would HYDRA want with a long-dead body? Why risk so much for so little pay-off? And why now?

At the doors to the morgue, Natasha glances through the narrow, horizontal window and doesn't doubt herself any longer.

Sidearm raised and aimed, finger on the trigger, she looks at the optic reader and steps inside.

Five drawers are open. Only one table is pulled out. Steve Rogers looms above the frozen body that's laid on it for almost nine months.

Natasha orders, "Step off."

As James had proved four years ago, bullets won't easily stop Rogers. Her sidearm is a weak threat, unless she's prepared to be ruthlessly brutal.

 _Don't make me_.

As stubborn as ever, Rogers doesn't move his feet or speak. His hands work at something she can't see.

Natasha nimbly scales around to his other side, keeping a wide zone of engagement, until she can see exactly it is that he's doing: hooking up a tablet to Barnes' left arm.

Immediately, she connects the dots: Barnes' left fist has been clenched since the day he'd died. Something has been inside of it.

"What are you doing?"

She doesn't expect him to answer, and he doesn't surprise her.

She tries again. "Where are they, Steve? Did you kill Sharon?"

His fingers freeze mid-tap.

The only reason that she doesn't shoot him dead is his knowledge of where James and Sharon are being held. Or where to find their bodies.

Rogers taps the tablet's screen. Natasha fires a bullet into it, too late to stop Rogers' last command from releasing Barnes' left fist. She keeps firing, intending to force him into cover. He takes the bullets—in his arm, in his leg, in his side—so he can pluck a black square out of Barnes' hand.

Anything except failure.

The next bullet is meant for his head.

 _Clink_.

A metal ball rolls across the floor. She really hates those.

Rogers runs toward the doors.

Natasha sprints in the opposite direction, as she shoots at the examiner's office window. She crashes through the splintered glass a moment before the grenade explodes.

She skids across the floor on her right shoulder, bangs into a filing cabinet, spins to her feet, and launches herself right back out into the morgue.

Natasha hardly sees the spickets of water shooting from the ceiling, or the charred papers flitting through the air, or even the chunks of concrete plummeting to the ground.

In the hallway, she zeroes in on Rogers' retreating back. Her bullets haven't done him any favors: he's slow, for him at least, and spilling blood.

Legs pumping, she tears down the hallway, holding her breath against the thick, acerbic smoke. From inside a pocket, she pulls out a taser disc – one made specifically for Rogers, for the worst of times after Death Valley.

This qualifies.

In a single, fluid motion, he stops at the elevator shaft, punches through the metal doors, and rips them aside.

Natasha throws the disc, satisfied as it sinks barbs into his neck and sizzles blue shocks of electricity across his body. The veins in his forehead and neck bulge, his body freezing upright, agony written into his face.

Mercy is for fools.

Two meters away, still at full speed, she leaps into the air, spins, and double-kicks him: one foot in the face, the other in the chest. While he sails through the air, she nimbly lands on the balls of her feet and tips of her fingers.

Rogers lands hard on his back, cratering into the pretty granite floor.

The chip flies out of his tactical vest and slides across the floor, behind him.

"JARVIS, scan it!" Just in case.

"Scanning, full spectrum."

Rogers recovers quicker than expected – veins still bulged, fading shocks coursing over his body – but he stands and wipes away a string of blood from his lip. He draws up, chest puffed, hands relaxed into loose fists: ready to go.

He's not so imposing today. Like James, like her, like all the others before and after them, HYDRA is keeping him underfed, sleep deprived, endlessly stressed, and likely drugged – controllable, manageable, malleable. His upper body bulk has appreciably shrunk by inches, while the sharp jut of his cheekbones and dark hollows under his eyes fabricate a pair of shadowed, ghoulish abysses.

He's the one they hadn't saved at all. The Steve fighting upstairs still treads water, never moving with the tide: it goes up, and he drowns, and it goes down, and he stands – for two infinite years. But this one drowned without ever knowing it.

Love is for children. Mercy is for fools. She doesn't dare stand down – but she dares.

"You can stay here, Steve. You can come home. Warm showers. Hot meals. All the sleep you can stand. You can paint all day."

She speaks from her own experience, through a lens that still amuses her: James, and his demand for all the nice things. She'd gone a different way for a long, long while.

His brow quivers just twice. Some part of that tempted him.

She goes in for the proverbial kill. "The rooftop here is nice. The stars are bright. The forest out there—" She jerks her head in that general direction. "—has long trails. You and Sam could run them."

The air changes. His face steels. She instantly knows her mistake.

Collateral: fourteen people like friends, before she learned better than to care. A room full of kids. Sam.

 _Something you don't want to come back from_ , as James describes it.

"Scan completed."

JARVIS's finely timed announcement serves as the starting pistol.

Natasha darts toward Rogers, as he races toward that chip. It's all he has eyes for. He scoops it from the ground, leg buckling for a solitary moment, and then guns it for the stairwell.

Her fingers grasp his too-long hair as he grasps the door's handle. They yank at the same time. The door heaves from its hinges.

Rogers turns into it, using his momentum to break her grasp and bludgeon her body with the door. Her head cracks against the wall, flashes of light darting in her peripheral.

He lets it go and starts up the stairs, into folding, feathering plumes of black smoke. Natasha chases him.

He rips railings from the wall, tossing them down at her.  _Clang, clang, clang!_

She deftly sidesteps them – unable to see but more than able to hear them. She draws her combat knife and flies up the steps, swift and silent.

A fist emerges from the smoke. Natasha ducks, slashes, and pushes with both hands. He falls backward onto the steps, a roundhouse kick connecting with her jaw. His own knife comes out, merely a glint in the obscured beacon of the emergency lighting; it heaves through her hand and sinks into the concrete.

Her knife-wielding hand is still good, and she uses it to slash at his throat. He leans backward to avoid it, his long arm span serving him exceptionally well: he grabs her hand and holds it away, grip tighter and tighter, her bones creaking.

"I know where your fucktoy is," he hisses, a disembodied voice swirling through the smoke. His white teeth gleam, and only then does she realize how close he is to her. "How many pieces of him did you want back?"

Love is for children.

To survive in the desolate, Siberian wilderness at the peak of winter, she'd killed every one of her things-like-friends, all fourteen of them. To survive without shelter, without food, she'd done unspeakable things to them.

Of them all, only James knows there isn't enough good to be done to clear their ledgers. In the mornings, as the sun rises, she wonders if her eyes are as blank and cold as his, before the dreams and memories scatter and hide until the next night.

Steve doesn't know that world.

 _It's not Steve_.

Natasha rips her hand from the floor, flips it over, and drives the knife's short blade into the soft, fleshy skin under his chin. With her other hand, she smashes her fist into his sternum, intending to break bone but crunching unexpected metal instead.

A flash of sizzling blue light blinds her, at the same time that Steve's fist smashes into her face.

Natasha falls into the side of the stairs, fingers clawing at the smooth, expensive granite. The knife tears away from her hand and, in the next second, slices and crunches through her left ribcage.

It's not until he's gone, long gone, does she realize that she's down, falling down the steps, while toxic, hot smoke shrivels her lungs, burns her throat, and sips away all of the oxygen.

And then darkness.

***

Clean and new only minutes ago, the floor is a jumble of decimated stone from body slams, ugly falls, merciless stomps, and dodged punches. The three battered walls bleed brick, mortar, and plaster.

Barnes bats away Natasha's punch, grasps her unbroken wrist, and leans backward to avoid her cartwheeling feet. Before she can devise another way out of his grip, he sharply kicks her in the jaw.

She steps backward once, expertly using the momentum from his kick to power into a back handspring. She lands lightly on her feet, wipes a bead of blood away from her gashed lip, and spits out a piece of broken tooth.

 _It's not Natasha_.

Lucky for her, he's nowhere near full capacity. His knees could buckle at any moment. His brain could short circuit within the next second. His heart could explode from its overburdened thumping.

Lucky for him, everything she is, he taught her to be. That's an advantage.

 _Stay down_  sits on the tip of his tongue. The Black Widow that she is, she'll devour such a weakness.

For seventy years, he didn't care, feel, or think twice. A target was a target; a mission was a mission. Within a handful of years, he'd shot her twice – once to kill. He takes himself back to April 2014, to indomitable clarity and efficient brutality.

Body relaxed, he goes at her, engaging in a frenetic, determined dance without a song: traded punches, fierce kicks, assailing flips, and intense holds broken only by brutality.

She drives a harsh, cartilage-snapping kick into his knee.

He backhands her across the face and follows-up with a kick to her throat.

She catches his foot, pushes up, and knows that he's going to use it to transition into a backflip. When he lands, her hand is already on his shoulder, and her body is already twirling around his, her thighs wrapping around his neck.

 _The fucking crotch hold._  He hadn't taught her that.

Her thighs squeeze his airway.

He walks them backward and slams them both into the wall, once, twice. He reaches up, grabs her, and tosses her to the floor, ass over head. As always, she lands perfectly controlled, on toes and the tips of ten fingers, smiling with bloody teeth.

She's not only playing with him, she's enjoying this. And why not: it's like old times in the Red Room. They'd gotten away with it for so long because of dances like these.

That's it. That's what she's doing. This isn't a real fight. Which means –

Barnes backs toward the two-way mirror.

Both of them out of breath, he sounds worse than her, with his thin, heaving breaths scraping from raw lungs. Sweat glistens on her forehead, watering down the splotches of blood.

He hasn't gotten close enough for the kill. He may not ever, while she will definitely outlast him. He weighs the odds of being able to not only outrun her but to find a way out of the building.

That smile of hers doesn't fade. She might as well be tying cinderblocks to his feet and preparing to throw him into an ocean.

He has to end this, before she gets to the end of her game.

There's not a lot in the world his arm can't bust up. His left arm  _whirring_ , he slams it into the window three times and doesn't shirk away as it finally shatters into a hundred jagged pieces.

The overwhelming stench of rotted death seeps into the room. He doesn't have the time to investigate why.

In a single, fluid motion, he swoops down, grabs a long shard of glass in his right hand, and springs toward her – just as she pulls out a glowing green device.

"Thanks for playing,  _milli moi_. It's been like old times."

She presses it, green turning to red, as he slides head-first, belly-down toward her feet.

Game over.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 11: Win the Night._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: "Portraits de famine" by Philippe Branch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSZR1UfRtL8&list=PLnOLLM1w8S4UdQIb8tZu6lAL5YzaneVJy); "Je t'aime" by Doloréanne (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw_4fJSk1Ng); "This is Love" by The Hunts
> 
> (But if I'm being honest: "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran coming on the radio originally inspired the entire BuckyNat cosmodrome plot. *slinks away*)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	11. Win the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> HYDRA has Bucky and Sharon on their hidden Cosmodrome island. Meanwhile, SHIELD's hangar bay is on liquid fire, and half the base is destroyed. HYDRA has already taken what they came for – and they’re still swarming the base, putting every nail in every coffin they can build. 
> 
> HYDRA wins the night. HYDRA wins everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Major character death. Interpersonal violence. Attempted suicide. References to rape.

Clear, blue water gently laps at a shore made of smooth, gray rocks. For hours and hours, its frigid water licks at an unmoving sun-singed, bruised hand.

Hours and hours pass.

That hand twitches, then flips palm-down, then drags in fits through packed dirt and over the shore's rocks. The fingers crawl to an ear, searching for and finding an earbud, even as a scratchy, weak voice croaks a desperate, hopeful "JARVIS."

JARVIS can't hear her, not here.

Here.

The Cosmodrome.

Sharon forces her eyes to open to the taunting, bright blue Arctic sky. Its endless, unforgiving sun sizzles against her exposed face. In July, it won't set into the relief of cool darkness.

Her body is alight with the numbed buzz of a too-strong drug cocktail, and her brain feels as good as mush. She makes it think, makes it remember.

The Atacama desert mission.

Early morning: yawning with Herron, and Barnes smirking at them.

Herron's dead in South America.

Barnes is a drugged, dead weight, and –

He's not here, not with her.

She has to get help.

Red-burnt hand over red-burnt hand, Sharon drags herself up a grassy, rock-strewn slope. Her muscles react sluggishly, and it's all she can do to put one hand in front of the other, skin tearing, splitting, and bleeding as she crawls and claws across the hard dirt.

Cuticles raw and bleeding, nails torn past their quicks, she crawls inch by inch, until her fingers claw against packed, debris-strewn dirt.

She makes it to a pile of debris—asphalt, rebar, bricks, twisted metal—and curls up around a lump of jagged concrete. Although her brain begs for sleep, and although her eyes slip and slide shut, harder and harder to open each time, she forces her fumbling fingers to her neck.

Her fingers find a frigid, metal star with pointy, sharp needles. One of those needles is embedded deep into her neck. She pulls it out and shoves it into the ground with weak, wrinkled fingers.

Against her will, her eyes slide shut, and she slips into a deep, tumbling sleep, the infinite Arctic sun beating down on her.

***

Shield up, Steve sprints at black-clad soldiers, the ricochet of their bullets splintering glass, popping through drywall, shattering Tony's expensive granite, and killing a few enemies.

They never go for his feet.

Steve baseball slides to an invisible home plate, as he swings the edge of the shield at knees: slicing skin, bone, ligaments, and cartilage. He tunes out the resulting screams.

He bounds to his feet and leaves those soldiers behind for Maria to finish. As he slams into the stairwell, he hears her measured gunshots, one execution at a time.

Steve exits on Four—Medical—and jogs through the locked-down hallway. He zig-zags between doors, jiggling locked handles, and finds absolutely no threat here.

The south stairwell is empty, dark, and silent. He bounds up to Five—intelligence, analysts, cube farms—and opens the door to spitting fire, shrieking alarms, and water gushing from the overhead sprinklers.

At 0200 in the morning, Five is typically empty. Thankfully, it is, though HYDRA had tossed in a few grenades for good measure.

Steve leaves Five and sprints up to Six.

As he goes, he taps his comm: static. The communication relays are down. Standard procedure is to clear each floor. That's easier said than done without comms – and with only one person. By the time he clears up to Twelve, HYDRA will be long gone.

Steve thinks this through: the hangar, the foyer, Ops on Three, and Intelligence on Five. HYDRA had skipped Medical.

They know the building layout.

Six is the Cafeteria and training rooms – not a target. Seven is Avengers' quarters, an armory, and more training rooms – a primary target. Eight, Nine, and Ten are living quarters – all viable targets. Eleven and Twelve is one combined story, and it all belongs to Banner and Stark. Then the roof.

Twelve. Bruce's lab, all of their research into what HYDRA's doing, and all of their accumulated artifacts, such as pylons, the Kozerska helix, and the portal device Tony'd stolen.

Steve sprints up the stairwell to Twelve and rips open the door.

Even in a split second, Steve can see fast enough that most of Bruce's computers, lab equipment, and collection of HYDRA technology are gone. It's been picked clean.

In the next split second, Steve notices at least six smashed, squished bodies on the floor.

Then, with growing horror, he realizes that Bruce isn't exactly in the office right now.

The Hulk roars.

***

Barnes' ankles lock down.

His left arm  _clangs_ to the floor.

His neck and head  _wham_  against the concrete floor, more shoots of sparks sprinkling through his peripheral.

His unsecured right hand keeps going, shard held like a knife. The tip of it slashes Natasha's femoral clean through, by the horrific grace of – luck, maybe. Instinctual skill, more like.

Slow-motion, betrayed shock stretches Natasha's face into a ghoul's mask. She steps backward, backward, backward, until her back hits the wall flat, bloody footprints leading back to him. The device goes with her.

Face smushed into the floor, lips collecting dust, Barnes lays immovable. He gives her a begged weakness. "Turn it off."

Her voice trembles. "You did that."

So quickly, a thin river of her copper-scented blood trickles through paths in the destroyed concrete, finding him.

She'll be dead in a few minutes, only her blood and her body left behind.

 _It's not Natasha_.

"Turn it off," he repeats.

She doesn't answer.

Desperately enraged, he jerks uselessly at the restraints and shrieks, "Turn it off! God damn it, turn it off!"

He keeps ahold of that anger and forces his  _whirring_ , vibrating left arm up from the floor. As quick as he can, he reaches forward before it bashes back down. He hears the concrete crumble under his fingers, while he digs his real fingers into the floor.

Nothing he does to himself now will at all measure close to what they'll do to him – if he doesn't get the hell out of here.

With a bit-back scream, he uses his arms to pull his body forward, agonizing inch by agonizing inch. Pressure builds in his face, but he doesn't mind. The skin around his ankles rubs raw, down to bone; who cares.

He does it again: left arm up from the floor, throwing it forward, fingers gouged in the ground, and then pulling his body forward, this time through her blood and dust.

Again and again and again and again and again, he screams and claws, closer and closer and closer and closer. He nears a hand's grasp away from her, and she kicks him again and again and again and again in the face, collarbone, shoulder, anywhere she can find. Whatever damage she does is as inconsequential as bugs splattering against a windshield.

With his right hand, he snatches the device from her fingers—nails chipped red—and crushes it.

As simple as that, the restraints release from the floor. He pushes himself up to his feet and scurries away, before she can surprise him with another trick or another game.

He looks down at her— _it's not Natasha_ —and sees pale skin, half-lidded eyes, heavy breaths, and blood pumping from her leg.

It's not Natasha, but she's the same one who had handed him a cup of MRE pasta, promised to put a bullet in his head, told him to stay until it was easy, and talked about ripples in a pond. She's the same one from all of Europe. She's the same one from the rooftop. She was once every bit of his Natasha, his Natashka.

The ripple catches up to her: silence, stillness, death.

***

Facing the opposite wall, his massive, green, muscled back to Steve, the Hulk roars. "My things! Took mine!"

Steve steps inside Banner's lab and purposefully lets the door  _clink_  closed.

The Hulk spins around, pushing angry breaths out of his nostrils so forcefully that the shattered glass covering the ground trembles.

"My things! They took!"

The Hulk waves his arms wildly, tearing through the remaining panes of glass, crashing though work tables, and stomping clean through the floor.

There  _are_ people on Ten, and they scream as concrete chunks career to their level. The Hulk covers his ears, violently jerking and shaking his head, then slaps his own face and roars again.

He could take down the building. Not  _exactly_  the approved way to handle HYDRA.

"Hey, Bruce. C'mon, now." Steve steps forward, hands out as if they could possibly mollify the situation. "This is your space. Look at what you're doing."

It doesn't help. At. All.

The Hulk snaps his attention to Steve, then barrels toward Steve, picking up incredible speed in such a limited space.

Steve runs faster, toward the unbroken exterior window across the room. He dives under the Hulk's colossal hands, rolls, throws his shield at the glass, and keeps running.

Behind him, the floor shakes and  _rolls_ , the Hulk screaming and stomping. That's great; absolutely great; because they'll both end up outside, away from the building and their people.

His shield boomerangs back at him, and he reaches out to slip it over his arm. Barely a second later, he puts the shield in front of him and leaps at the cracked window, readying his body for a long, probably painful fa—

He bounces.

The glass barely spiderwebs.

Steve lands hard on his back, nothing but green filling his vision. Then white and red: white teeth and a large, red tongue.

Hot, moist breath assaults Steve's face, as the Hulk doubles over with laughter. "Ha, ha, ha, ha! Steve stupid! Captain Stupid! Can't figure out wall!"

The Hulk reaches down and snatches Steve's shield right off his arm. He slips it over his pinky finger, then parades in a stomping, crashing, destructive circle. "Captain Stupid! Can't figure out wall! Look! I show!"

The Hulk rushes toward the window, barely avoiding stomping Steve's body into super-serumed splatter, and leaps toward the splintered glass. "Ha, ha, ha! Captain Stu—"

The glass breaks.

The Hulk teeters at the edge of the floor, giant green toes curling around the edge of the floor, giant green arms pinwheeling. Steve's shield slips to the floor, a moment before the Hulk falls and leaves a satisfying, groaning scream in his wake.

"Yeah," Steve huffs, as he rolls over onto his stomach, and then up onto his knees. "It's a fucking window."

In the night sky, Iron Man blasts onto the scene in a brilliant blur of red and gold,  _entirely fucking too late_.

Steve watches him dive toward the Hulk and hears him say, "Hey there, Big Guy. Have you noticed the sun's real low? No?"

Far below, the Hulk shouts, "Captain Stupid tricked Hulk!"

Like clockwork, Tony wastes time by flying to the broken window, then hovering there. "Sooo… Captain Stupid, I presume?"

HYDRA has Bucky and Sharon. The hangar bay is on liquid fire, and half the base is destroyed. HYDRA has already taken what they came for – and they're still swarming the base, putting every nail in every coffin they can build.

With all that considered…

Steve spits out a heavy breath. "Go fuck yourself."

"Language!"

***

Barnes knows better, but his stinging eyes don't. He knows better, but his shaking body doesn't. He knows better, but his suffocating grief doesn't. He knows better, but he loves her, owes her, needs her.

Barnes goes to the dirty, blood-stained, once-was white blanket in the opposite corner. Its smell of bleach is long faded. The children it once covered are long dead; had they lived, they would be in their 70's now.

Tears don't tear down his face; it's sweat. His eyes don't swell red from grief and guilt; it's exhaustion and dust. His body doesn't shake from heartache and sorrow; it's shock and trauma. All the pretty lies add up better than the ugly truths.

He hadn't noticed before: the blanket covers a thin lump. With two pinched fingers, he pulls the fabric up and yanks it away. Eyes heavy and cold, he blinks to make sure his eyes aren't making shit up.

The thin lump is identifiably Nick Fury: months dead, body mummifying.

Suspecting it is one thing. Finding him, seeing it, is something else entirely. It's something he can't feel. Something he can't handle.

A high-pitched tone washes out his hearing. His own breaths reverberate in his ears, louder and louder. The room tilts— _the foundation's off_ —just so, enough for him to know he's at the end of whatever rope he ever had.

Even still, he takes the senseless time to drag Natasha's body across the room and to lay her next to Fury. He takes the time to arrange her hands and legs in a dignified manner, and he takes the time to close her eyes. He takes the time to drape the blanket over both of them.

He takes the time to watch the dirty, yellow-gray cotton saturate red.

Always red.

***

Steve lets Tony deal with Bruce and shoots into the stairwell. He goes down to Nine—agent quarters for both the experienced and the rookies—ready to fight.

It's already a blood bath—but not the kind HYDRA had apparently been expecting. The hallways are dark chaos: yells, gunshots, and the sounds of body parts hitting body parts.

As he moves into the fray, he avoids stepping on bodies of HYDRA soldiers. He approaches one who  _is_  standing: attacking one of the rookies with a sharp, long-bladed knife.

From behind, Steve snaps the soldier's neck, picks up the limp body, and throws it at two others. They topple like bowling pins, giving two SHIELD agents room to kill.

He may not be Captain America, but these are his people. This is his base. HYDRA can't have any more it, or of them.

Steve steps in between a soldier and a rookie he recognizes as Alievi, blocks a knife strike, and lethally turns that knife against the soldier. He stays long enough to see Alievi briefly slump, before the whites of her eyes shine in the dim red light and she inserts herself in another fight.

She and so many others are still alive, when they should have been the proverbial school of fish in a barrel, ready for shooting. If Bucky makes it back, he might be proud of them.

_Bucky._

_If._

_Sharon._

The edges of his vision blur into a deep, dark black. The noises wash into a single roar. He walks further into the hallway, pinpointing HYDRA soldiers with vicious clarity and eliminating each of them with terrifying precision.

Slashes of his shield.

Liquefying punches.

Spines dislocated from brain stems.

Bodies smashed into walls.

Etcetera.

He barely notices his people stepping back, shirking out of his way, their expressions torn between relief and fright.

The tearing of skin, breaking of bone, and spilling of warm blood feels good. The rhythm of the dance keeps beat in his mind, not a step wasted, not a punch ill thrown, not a kick or a grab or a vicious stab of his shield failing to find its mark.

Steve kills.

A fist pulled back, ready to break bone, he glimpses Maria's face at the last possible moment.

The music scratches to silence.

"We're clear here," Maria says. "Stand down."

He trusts her enough to believe it.

His hand falls to his side. He makes his voice and his words sound like they once might have. "HYDRA took the portal tech and Bruce's research. Tony is engaging the Hulk on the ground. Did Natasha clear the sublevels?"

Maria shakes her head, as her hand futilely reaches for her ear piece – even she forgets. "Negative. Get down there."

Steve doesn't waste time tearing down the stairs, not when the elevator is that many steps closer. He pries apart the doors with his bare hands and drops himself into the dark shaft. The car suspended far above, Steve craters into Subfloor Five, superficial pain shooting up his ankles into his knees. His left one buckles; he makes it stand.

With a well-aimed punch through the doors, Steve rips them open and climbs through into the secondary mechanical room. Steam hisses from a labyrinth of pipes and valves, while generators, blowers, handlers, tanks, and pumps rattle, shake, and moan.

Steve trots through the dark room, eyes cutting through shadows and obscurity to identify threats. He wouldn't say he's cleared the space, but he's confident that HYDRA hadn't come down this far.

Up a level, he emerges on the opposite side of Archives, near the morgue. Gunpowder and explosives tinge the air. One of the morgue's doors—the one he'd dented almost a year ago—lays in the hallway.

Steve's stomach drops.  _Bucky_.

Further down, smoke from the hangar bay billows through the open doorway, thickly obscuring a good third of the hallway.

Fearless, Steve jogs to the morgue and takes it all in. The scorch marks on the floor. The chunks of concrete from the broken ceiling. The sunken cavity where a grenade had exploded. The shattered window of the examiner's office. All the open drawers. One table pulled out.

Steve takes the time to walk to that table, and he takes the time to wrap his hands around the body's lukewarm right arm. The left is missing three plates and has a black computer cord sticking out of the wrist. The fist is open, palm up.

Steve had stared at that clenched fist for hours. He'd never thought to try to open it.

They'd come for the portal tech – and for whatever this Bucky had been hiding all this time.

Enough time wasted, Steve runs out of the room and turns toward the northerly stairwell, where the smoke billows. He can't see a damn thing and trips over a thick, metal door on the floor; he catches himself before he falls.

In the stairwell, an arm covering his face, his eyes burn. He stops breathing, knowing he can last long enough to not need air. He climbs the steps one at a time.

Not even his enhanced vision is enough to cut through the pitch black dark and smoke. He puts a hand in front of his face and can barely see its outline.

A flight and a half of stairs up, his foot connects with something soft and mushy. A stomach, maybe. A body. It doesn't move.

It could be a HYDRA combatant, or it could be Natasha. He risks it and leans over the body, trying to get close enough to be able to  _see_ something.

He can't.

He inhales through his nose.

Gun oil. Jet fuel. Hairspray. Pasta.

Blood.

Natasha.

He can't tell if she's breathing.

Steve scoops her up and dashes up the stairs, daring HYDRA to be in here, daring them to make another move.

She doesn't make a noise. Her arms and legs dangle limply. He feels and hears an impossible, steady pulse.

He hurries to Medical.

It's still on lockdown. Steve kicks in every single door—he doesn't count how many—until he finds a handful of nurses and one of the physicians.

Not one of them hesitate to take Natasha out of his hands, deposit her body on an exam table, and begin working.

"What happened?"

Against lockdown protocol, one of the nurses flips on a portable light, illuminating ashen, soot-covered skin, blackened blood, and a black-hilted knife protruding from Natasha's left lung.

His lips numb, Steve replies, "I found her in the subfloor stairwell. It was filled with smoke from the hangar bay. I don't know how long."

That's the proper answer, the one they need, to give her the appropriate medical care.

The real answer, the only one that might matter, is that HYDRA won the night.

HYDRA won everything.

***

 _ROOAAR_.

Engines. It sounds like jet engines.

Sharon drags her eyes open and spits a piece of gravel past her cracked, painful lips and out of her dry, disgusting-tasting mouth. She peers up at the still-blue sky; a Quinjet with flashing red lights soars low, turns, and lands beyond a cluster of debris hills, near the towering, brick buildings.

Dizzy, Sharon crawls to her feet. With a still-buzzing, sunburnt hand, she draws her sidearm and fumbles to flick off the safety. She doesn't know if she has the physical ability to aim, should she need to, not with her clumsy fingers and blurry eyesight.

Her feet are numb. Each step feels uneven and precarious, while her thigh muscles tighten and seize. None of it matters.

This jet might be her one chance to leave and get help.

 _I'm leaving you behind here_ , she thinks to Barnes.

The thought alone tightens her throat and twists her stomach: no one gets left behind. It's a promise and a rule. Doing it is contrary to everything she is and everything she believes.

The reality is that he could be in any one of those buildings—or beyond them somewhere else, long far gone—and she'll never make it long enough to find him. Getting help is the only way.

She rounds the last debris pile, makes her legs bend, and squats down, one knee pressed into broken asphalt.

Weapon aimed, she examines the landscape beyond the debris: broken roads, scant moss and weeds, leading to the cluster of buildings. The jet has landed a few hundred meters from the short building with the hole in the side – but it's at least five-hundred meters from her position, through open, exposed, brightly lit terrain.

The longer she waits, the less chance she has of stealing the jet. It's also less of a chance that her body will hold out long enough to make it there.

In the distance, a blunt rumble of engines echoes. Sharon turns, her eyes scanning the clear sky. If she squints, she can make out a flurry of flashing lights, their red stark against the blue, like wild poppies on a nice day.

Time may already be out.

_Make it._

Sharon inhales a gulp of cool air, expanding her lungs and fueling her blood, and then sluggishly runs toward the jet.

***

Barnes doesn't bother trying to see if the door will open for him; he knows it won't, not without a lot of noise and a lot of effort. Instead, he hops through the broken window and –

Sees Peggy Carter, not a day past 1945, laying amongst a room full of dead, generic soldiers. Her neck is snapped, and her head is awkwardly angled.

Old, wrinkled, and sick, Peggy died in May 2016. He'd watched the coverage on the news from upstate New York: Steve, Natasha, and Tony standing at the funeral, along with a person he didn't recognize as Sharon then.

For too long, he stands and gapes, lost in a waking dream that  _won't make sense_. Her hair is brown and antiquely curled. Her lips are matte red. Her blouse, skirt, hose, and shoes are old-fashioned but as classically coiffed as ever. It's her, as if HYDRA reached back in time and plucked her right off a cobblestone London street.

_Why—_

_For Steve._ To keep Steve hooked.

It's not her.

Barnes kicks dead soldiers aside, makes his way to her, and bends down. Even that motion swells pressure inside his forehead, his right eye twitching. He stands back up and bends at the knee instead.

He peels the photostatic veil half-off and finds Emma Russell underneath. Steve's fucking therapist.

Everything in this world is upside down.

He takes the mask and stuffs it into the pocket of his combat pants. They can make a hundred more, but – for now, they can't do that to Peggy, or to the other Steve.

Barnes exits into the hallway.

Once pitch dark, the hallway is as brightly lit as that room. Decomposing bodies of HYDRA soldiers pile on the floor: some necks snapped, others with bullets in their heads, others with efficient stab wounds. They look a day, maybe two days dead.

Natasha had gone completely off the rails – to protect him, the only way she knew how in this upside-down place.

And he'd killed her.

The thought is too much to process. It short-circuits – a simple question overloading the motherboard. All he needs to focus on is  _leaving_ , before the other Steve or more of HYDRA show up.

Barnes walks past where the secretary's desk had once been, now an empty space with new flooring, then through a new steel door, its paint fresh.

He lurks down stairsteps recently coated with smooth concrete, listening through the buzzing, white noise in his ears. Painted numbers in a modern font announce each level.

_CLANG!_

_Boom-boom-boom-boom_.

From above – a door shutting and footsteps, maybe. Heavy ones.

Someone here is still alive.

Fear doesn't trickle through him. Panic doesn't take any sort of hold over him. He can't afford to believe that he'll survive this day – and he can't afford to believe that he won't.

He tries and fails to remember where Sam had blown the hole in the building. Even though everything else is repaired and refurbished, they'd left that hole and everything else on the exterior the same. In hindsight, a decoy, to keep SHIELD from snooping.

 _CLANG._ Still from above.

He'd rather jump out of the building up here, than wander through the whole fucking thing trying to find the front door. It won't take the person upstairs much time to find him.

Because god is bored, and because this life is only good for moments like these, Steve crashes into the steps in front of him, boots cratering into the fresh concrete, a punch already thrown.

On hard-won reflexes alone, Barnes ducks, grabs Steve's arm with his left, and slips Steve's spare sidearm out of his shoulder holster with his right.

Adrenaline sputtering out, he doesn't expect Steve's elbow to pound into his head, and he doesn't expect his body to be flung backward by the force of the blow.

He slams into the wall, head snapping against it, concrete bits sprinkling to the ground.

His vision flickers to black and back and black again. Lightning splinters up through his skull, up and up, and up. On top of the sedatives, the nerve agents, the head injury, the exhaustion – he folds, broken down and shriveled up on Floor Five, three below where he'd lost his first life.

It's done.

Barnes presses the barrel of the sidearm against his forehead, slips his finger to the trigger, closes his eyes, and fires.

His right eardrum bursts. The tip of his right ear burns. Shards of concrete blast against his face. Steve's fist crunches into his cheekbone.

The sidearm skitters down the stairs. His vision flashes from black to red and then to jerking, opaque shadows. Behind his forehead, a pressure painfully swells, but not from any bullet.

"It's not going to be that easy, Buck."

He can't say he's surprised to hear so much of Steve in that voice. Once upon a time, there'd been a lot more of Bucky in the Winter Soldier.

"How'd you put it?" Steve taunts. "'You're my mission.'"

Rough fingers slide across Barnes' scalp, grip a chunk of his hair, and painfully uses it to pull his body across the floor.

"I saw what you did. Reinforcements are coming. All said: I'm looking forward to watching."

Barnes' back scrapes and bounces against the stair treads. Steve's heavy footsteps pound next to his ears. They're going back up – up to that room.

 _No_.

He still can't see, but he doesn't need to, not to reach up with his left arm, sink his fingers into Steve's wrist, and think  _crush_.

Steve screams as his wrist breaks. His fingers release. His uninjured hand clobbers into Barnes' face, followed by the toe box of a thick-soled combat boot.

Barnes tumbles down the stair treads, back to the landing, and rolls into the wall. Frantic coughs erupt from his chest, bringing up wet bits of something.

There's nothing left between them that can stop this. He knows something that might. "Peggy's upstairs. She's—"

 _No_ , his instincts scream. It'll set Steve off. More off.

A piercing ring eats away at his hearing. He doesn't hear Steve come back down, but he feels another kick, and he mutedly hears Steve shout, "If you  _touch_  her!"

"You'll what?" Barnes taunts, because he's not going down quietly. He won't. "Do this?"

Steve reacts with another attempted vicious kick. Barnes flings himself at the shadow that looks like Steve's legs.

Together, they topple and bounce down the steps, arms over arms, heads over asses, legs over legs. They come to rest in a bitter tangle on the mid-floor landing.

Steve flips to his feet, at the same time Barnes rolls up to his shaky own set of feet. He makes out the dim, fuzzy outline of a not-so-thickly-built person and back kicks Steve squarely in the throat.

Barnes roars back up the stairs, as Steve sails down the other set.

With his primary goal of gaining distance from Steve, he runs up past Floors Five and Six, barely able to see the painted numbers on the walls.

On a desperate whim, he slams through the door for Seven. He has no idea what he's going to do without a weapon or a way out, but it's a chance.

He limps into a wide-open expanse of burnt cubicle walls and office equipment. A blast of fresh, Arctic air and charred ash cyclone around him. Bright sunlight spills through a man-sized hole in the northern wall. On the floor near the opening, something small, metallic, and gold sparkles.

_Boom-boom-boom-boom._

Steve's coming, and Barnes doesn't have time to think how lucky he is. He runs toward the opening, without a plan for  _what then_. Behind him, the door rips off its hinges and  _clang-clang-clangs_  down the steps.

He's going to jump, and Steve is going to jump right after him. In his head, he runs his odds of dying if he swan dives: not great.

The footsteps behind him are quick and powerful: running. Steve hasn't realized that this is game over.

Without a glance backward, Barnes sprints to the opening, past the sparkling gold thing, and jumps.

Weightlessness sucks away his stomach and breath.

As he leaps, he glimpses a blurry swarm of Quinjets in the distance, red lights like tulips against the blue sky: HYDRA's he—

Well-known pain erupts in the back of his neck. Warm, buzzing drugs swarm through his body, as good as a horde of fire ants rampaging through a tasty lunch.

Body limp, mind bleeding away, he hits the ground like one of his sister's ragdolls.

***

The rumble of engines becomes louder. So do Sharon's footfalls that crunch across asphalt, gravel, and green moss. So does her heartbeat, booming loudly in her ears. So do her breaths, nothing but thin, frantic wheezes squeezing out of her failing body.

The landscape spins and wobbles. Her head floats, tongue numb, hands shaking, body vibrating from the inside out.

Her legs pump faster and faster, at least she thinks they do.

The engines sound closer, so close they could be right on top of her. The Arctic is empty and sound travels – they could still be miles out. Every moment counts.

Her hands slap against the nose of the jet, and she slides under it, taking cover under its belly.

No voices. No bullets. No stomping feet. Just her too-loud breaths and too-loud, racing heart. Just her. And those engines.

Sharon crawls on her stomach to the ass-end of the jet. The ramp is recklessly, gloriously already down. She peers through the triangle of open space between it and the hull, scanning the terrain again for –

In the near distance, barefoot and bloody, Barnes jumps from the hole in the short building.

Shocked, surprised, and not so much trusting her eyes, Sharon watches his body turn from purposeful and controlled to limp and powerless, and she watches him smack hard onto the ground, unmoving.

Sharon doesn't think. She launches through the triangle and runs to his body, another burst of adrenaline carrying her all the way to him.

No time to check his pulse or respiration, and no time to wonder where his boots, tactical vest, and weapons went, Sharon reaches for his arm but happens to look up first.

Staring down from the opening, HYDRA's Steve stands frozen, eyes locked onto her. She meets those eyes – thinking of painting, flower boxes, cooking, hiking, and all the arguments they'd shared as two strong personalities in the same small space. It'd been with him as much as the Steve back home.

He doesn't move toward them. He only stares, with old blood on his face and swathed down his neck, his clothes tinged with soot and jagged holes. Something glistening hangs from his fingers.

He doesn't matter. He can't.

Sharon dares to grab Barnes' left arm, dragging him away from the building, Steve, and the incoming jets.

Expecting Steve to pursue, she glances back. He hasn't moved.

He's… He's letting them go.

Sharon pulls Barnes' body across the dirt and mossy asphalt. Jet engines roar and blast torrents of wind overhead, overshooting them. All of them circle the building with the hole in the side.

She has no idea what's going on, or why those jets are more interested in Steve than in them, but she takes small favors where she can find them.

As quick as she can, she moves them along, down the devoured roadway. Barnes is lighter than he looks, and his body glides smoothly across the ground. He doesn't move, speak, or groan; he might be dead.

A concentrated storm of voices echo and boom from the cluster of buildings. Irrationally, she worries about Steve, although she knows he's home, safe and sound.

By the time they reach the ramp of the Quinjet, she's far out of breath, sweat coating her skin. She drags Barnes up to the hold, her feet carelessly pounding against the metal.

Halfway through the cargo hold, Sharon drops him on the floor and hauls ass to the cockpit. She skips preflight checks and goes straight to powering up the systems, igniting the engines, engaging stealth mode, and lifting off into the sunrisen sky.

GPS and navigation flash "error" messages; every other system reliant on satellites and ground-installations are as useless. A rapid-fire decision made, Sharon points the jet west toward Scandinavia.

Radar works perfectly, displaying upwards of five jets behind them and three helicopters closing in on the island. Sharon increases altitude and air speed, pushing the jet to its pre-stall limits, while she watches the radar with mounting trepidation.

HYDRA's here.

***

Hands shoved in his pockets, Steve stares through slats of the privacy blinds of Natasha's hospital room.

The oxygen mask is gone. So is the bag of blood for transfusions. Under her loose gown, thick gauze and a drainage tube are still pretty easy to see. Her stabbed hand is stitched and bandaged. She's doing better: sleeping, resting, recovering.

He'd never put money on himself winning that fight.

"You're torturing yourself."

Steve glances at Rhodes in greeting. "Maybe."

"C'mon," Rhodes cajoles. "Show me where the coffee is. I'm never here."

That's Rhodes, who damn well knows where to find the Cafeteria, graciously giving the illusion of a choice.

In the Cafeteria, Rhodes pushes a steaming ceramic cup of coffee across the table. The sides of it are splattered beige. Steve takes it in his hands, appreciating the warmth without an appetite to drink it.

By luck alone, the base has been cleared of any remaining explosives, surprises, and/or enemy combatants. Most of the subfloors are gutted, including the hangar bay. More than half of the above-levels of the base took heavy damage. There's a God damned Quinjet inside the foyer, delivered by the Hulk.

Oh: and fifteen of their people died, while three are critical, including Natasha, and two are missing. Meanwhile, Tony's crews are still pulling burnt bodies from the hangar. "It was built to withstand this" is being thrown around like parade candy; tell that to the families.

Coffee isn't on his to-do list.

"We have teams out there searching. Sam. Tony. JARVIS has every instrument possible running."

They have every instrument impossibly searching two worlds for two people. If his counterpart has anything to do with it, Bucky's going to end up like the body downstairs – and, for Sharon's sake, Steve hopes she's dead.

Rhodes dips his head down and tries to catch Steve's eyes. Steve ignores him. "It wasn't you."

It was his eyes that let him into the building, and it's his face on the security cameras. Watching security footage, Steve had been two steps ahead of himself: every decision and move predicted seconds before the other "him" had done it. It was as good as.

"You fought them to stop it. You helped save the base. You got to Natasha in time to save her life. Take credit for that, not what someone else did."

Steam rolls from the ridge of the cup. It's not about him, or the hangar bay, or even Natasha. That's all done and over: unchangeable, concrete. Two of their own are still out there, anywhere, nowhere. Search teams can search. Scanning equipment can scan.

In his gut, he knows: it's essentially been three days since Bucky and Sharon had landed in the Atacama Desert, and possibly three days since HYDRA captured them. "They're not coming back."

Rhodes takes a long drink of coffee. "I thought that about Tony in '08. We got Iron Man out of it. All this." Rhodes gestures widely at the building. "I thought that about you, after three months of finding absolutely nothing."

Steve chuffs out a sick laugh. They'd found him, all right; he's present but not so much accounted for, hence why he's here instead of out there, actually  _doing something_.

After losing himself on Nine, after enjoying what he'd done there, he can't—won't—argue his status. He gets it.

Rhodes' tablet chirps with a notification. Steve is happy for the distraction and hopes it means that Rhodes leaves.

Something secretive passes over Rhodes' expression. Steve knows better than to ever ask.

"I've got to take this," Rhodes says. "You okay?"

Steve watches the steam rise from his cup. "Swell."

With a deep frown, Rhodes gets up, pats Steve's shoulder, and takes care of whatever it is he's taking care of.

Steve leaves the coffee on the table and goes back to Natasha's window. She hasn't moved: still sleeping, still stable.

She'll wake up alone but at least not with her assailant next to her.

***

All of HYDRA's air activity fixates on the island. If they know she and Barnes are in the air, they don't much care. Five minutes into flight, the radar clears. Another five minutes after that, the radar stays clear.

Sharon engages the auto-pilot and spins around in her chair. She fights back the urgent lure of  _sleep_ , and a more irrational urge to jump into the cold water far, far below and gulp it by the gallon.

"Barnes? Barnes."

He's an unmoving lump, skin pale with dark shadows and deep crescents under his eyes. His face is spectacularly bruised with what looks like a number of blunt force injuries. Bright red pinpricks, dark bruises, and raw lacerations ring his neck and arm. He's still alive, at least: his chest rises and falls, albeit slowly.

Sharon can't leave the cockpit unintended, especially without navigation and guidance systems. And especially with the transponder light flashing: they're trackable. He's on his own for now.

As they traverse the Barents Sea and approach land, Sharon strongly suspects they're in the alternate world. Twenty minutes later, Sharon manually adjusts their bearing south, toward cities and civilizations.

Minutes pass.

Out the windshield, Sharon peers far, far below and sees only inky darkness: no lights, no activity. More convincingly, commercial aircraft don't inundate the radar, when she should be seeing hundreds of flights.

It's the other world.

Sharon doublechecks the radar once more—it's clear—sets auto-pilot, and then leaves her seat. In the cargo hold, she checks five compartments, each more desperately than the last, before finding a parachute and an accompanying oxygen mask. In the sixth, she finds a tactical vest: perfect.

Under her feet, Barnes doesn't move. Before doing anything with the gear, she squats down and checks his body for those little stars. She pulls two out of his neck, one out of his shoulder, and two out of his thigh: no fucking wonder he's down. Each of the stars has eight ampules;  _one_  ampule had put her down for…

Well. She doesn't know. For a while, she thinks. A long while.

Leaving nothing to chance, she runs her hands up his shirt, checking his arms, torso, chest, and back for surprises. Shameless, she undoes his pants and checks his lower body, finding nothing except – evidence of intercourse.

Her eyes flick to his face, as if he's awake and able to provide an answer; the damage done to the rest of his body provides enough of one.

 _Steve_ , she thinks.

It's a problem for  _if_  they get home, and not until then.

Sharon stashes the little stars in an equipment drawer.

She slides on the oxygen mask and shrugs herself into the parachute pack, tightening its straps. Then, she straddles Barnes' hips and slips the tactical vest around his chest, zipping it tight and checking its straps and hooks for serviceability. Satisfied, Sharon rolls him over and clips his vest to the front of hers.

With a deep breath, she pushes herself and him up, lifting and supporting all of his weight. Although he's not as heavy as he looks, and although he's only about four inches taller than her, he's bulkier and encumbering.

She steps back and back, almost balancing her body against his, and hits the "ramp down" button twice.

It lowers.

She jumps into the pleasant darkness of the black night.

Falling through the biting, frigid air, they're weightless. She squeezes her arms around Barnes' chest, trying to absorb a modicum of heat from his ever-burning engine. The air is too cold for it to make a bit of difference.

She tilts her head down into the crook of his neck, closes her eyes, and counts the seconds until she has to pull the cord.  _It'll only get warmer_ , she tells herself; summer in Finland is usually at least 60 Fahrenheit, with the promise of daylight before 0500.

As they plummet toward the ground, Barnes doesn't wake, move, or make a single sound. She can feel his slow breaths but not his pulse, and so she spider-steps two fingers up to his neck. Instead of a pulse, she finds a cold metal collar.

 _Later_.

Her fingers crawl around his neck, until they find the right spot and the right sensation of a slowly thrumming pulse. He's very much alive and very much baked out of his mind.

Although relieved, a little bit of dread pops into her gut: he's going to be a dead weight for what is going to be a lot of ground travel. Something to deal with when they get to it.

Sharon glances down, unable to see  _anything_ , then glances up. The red light of the jet flashes high, high above, zooming west, nearly out of sight against the backdrop of a million, breathtaking pinprick stars.

She pulls the cord, releasing the parachute and holding her breath against the abrupt, backwards tug as the air drags their plummet into a controlled, smooth drop.

Sharon tears off the oxygen mask and breathes in warmer, fresh air; it tastes like earthy water. Below, the moonlight glints off a myriad of streams, waters, lakes, and ponds. Landing in one of those would be the icing on this bad day cake. At least she could have a drink of water.

Partly by the grace of God, and partly through decent steering, they land mere feet from the bank of a wide river.

Sharon's boots scrape against the shingled roof of a stout green bathhouse. Weighted down by Barnes, she trips as they land, falling forward onto him and coming to rest inches from a leaning wrought-iron fence.

The parachute floats down on top of them.

On the bright side, no one will ever know about this.

***

At 1700, over three days after the start of the second Atacama mission, Steve sits in the War Room's briefing room instead of tearing apart the world to find them.

More than three days.

He let Bucky fall once. He let HYDRA take Sharon once. Now twice.

Tony opens the briefing room door, Natasha using his shoulder as an unlikely support.

It's been – not nearly long enough for her to be recovered, let alone out of Medical. She's pale; eyes ringed with dark lines; and out of breath by  _walking_.

Tony spins a finger around his temple. "She refused the wheelchair."

As she lowers herself into one of the chairs, Natasha winces. "Have to make you useful somehow."

Tony sits next to Steve and intentionally whacks his knee into Steve's thigh; Tony's language for "we're friends."

"Hey, Steve," Natasha greets, tone cool like always, but her voice weak. She doesn't sound mad, but she should be. "Thanks for the rescue."

"Sure," he replies.

Maria leans forward, hands clasped atop the table. "Agent Wilson and Colonel Rhodes are searching. We have yet to locate Dr. Banner." She pauses. "This is it. Tony?"

Tony throws a file at the holographic screen. Half of the screen displays a 3D rendering of a square black chip; the other half scrolls through strings of computer code and mathematical equations. That's all Steve can make out.

"Romanoff?" Tony prompts.

"Hot potato," she jokes, already out of breath. "The other Rogers came for that. The other Barnes had it in his left hand. I had JARVIS scan it, in case…what happened happened."

Maria looks to Tony. "What is it?"

Tony taps a pen on the wooden surface of the table. "A control chip containing maybe a third of Zola's algorithm."

Steve shuts his eyes.  _Zero sum_.

"The chip would hypothetically fit into any of the helices – at least that we've seen so far. Banner would know for sure, whenever he gets back. Captain Stupid really hurt his feelings."

Just in case the implications hadn't been clear, Maria drives it all the way home, a tinge of question in her tone. "They're recreating Insight?"

"Redesigning, more like."

Voice hoarse, Natasha wonders, "The other world, Chișinău, and the town in Washington - were they test sites?"

"Fair bet. Assuming the algorithm is in pieces like that, they figured out with all their tests that they needed the whole shebang. Now they do. Buckle up."

Eyes open again, Steve grasps at straws. "Then why Bucky and Sharon? If that chip is all they needed, then who cares about them?"

Steve moves his eyes to each of them, willing one of them to give him an answer. He needs a God damn answer.

Natasha takes a shaky breath, eyes almost red, and probably thinks she's still putting up a neutral, unaffected face.

Tony bleeds pity for them, for Steve, but it's clear that his care and focus is on the science, not the horror.

Maria, though. Maria won't look him in the eye. Maria  _knows_.

No one says a damn thing.

Under his unconscious grip, the wood table splinters, then breaks clean in half. The middle caves in.

Tony pushes off and slides away in his chair, a heavy, coughed sigh from Natasha following him. Maria doesn't move to pick up her tablet or even the scattered papers.

"You know," Steve accuses her. His voice sounds like it doesn't belong to him, and he floats inches above the room, watching, hiding. Black encroaches his vision. "You  _know_."

Controlled, even, Maria talks. "We were infiltrated the day before the base attack. Our mission files were downloaded off a local server. Explosive devices were placed in the hangar bay and the second floor lounge." Maria pins Steve with an apologetic but hard stare. "Captain Rogers and Agent Barnes were compromised. And she attempted to take the chip then."

Steve crashes back down into his body. His throat closes. His heart stops.

He runs through that morning in his head, sorting through his truths, running away from a chilling possibility that can't be, can't be, can't be.

"'She'?" Natasha pointedly asks.

Maria's stare moves to Natasha. "You. We have visual confirmation that, while you prepared for your mission that morning, someone with your face, voice, and identical biometrics infiltrated the base, downloaded the information, planted explosives, 'entertained' Barnes, attempted to retrieve the chip, and—"

She stops talking. Steve feels her eyes on him, even as his head sinks into his hands, fingers burrowing into his scalp, while his body burns hotter and hotter, mounting tension preparing him to implode.

He knows what he did. What he said. What he let happen.

"—and Captain Rogers informed her of the location of the Atacama mission."

Natasha should be in Medical and just learned that she has a counterpart running around, but her focus shifts to making  _him_ feel better. "You didn't know, Rogers. Neither did he. Don't blame yourself."

Tony's chair squeaks. "Barnes thought they had another Romanoff."

"It was a mutually shared suspicion that we were never able to confirm. He and I discussed it." Maria pauses. "However, there is some indication that she may have been infiltrating us since 2017 as a PRN nurse using a— Captain?"

Legs numb, head light and dizzy, Steve pushes himself to his feet. His half of the table falls sideways, as his chair rolls away. He leaves, and no one follows.

His legs take him to Seven, to a door to an apartment for a person who'll never come back. Who'll end up like the body in the morgue.

Steve's body shakes.

"JARVIS, please."

 _Click_.

He goes inside and asks JARVIS, one more time, for entry to another space not his to enter. JARVIS gives him that entry.

The kitchen counter is clean but full of junk food like popcorn, chips, pretzels, and, of course, empty Pepsi cans; also, hardback books that Bucky loved to read and home design magazines that Sharon loved to flip through.

Two dirty plates and two dirty skillets wait in the sink; someone had eaten eggs, potatoes, and toast that morning.

The refrigerator is decorated with a couple sets of alphabet letters that mostly spell strings of obscene words. On the island, a half-played Scrabble board is set up for two. It fits them both.

April 23 through July 2. For two months and nine days, they'd had it all, reality coming as close to a dream as Steve ever could have expected.

It's his fault they're gone.

Steve sits on the floor next to the oven, hands pressed into his eyes, fingernails digging into his forehead.

It's his fault.

 _Click_.

"I got it, Stark." Natasha.

"Want me to stick around?" Tony.

"No.  _I've got it_."

The door closes, and Steve hears Natasha's uneven, slow footsteps limp toward the kitchen. There, she leans in the doorway, chest heaving out thin, scrappy breaths. Sweat trickles down her pale forehead.

If it was anyone else, he'd already be up, offering help. He won't dare touch her.

"Steve…"

She looks around the kitchen the same way he had earlier, seeing the same loss.

Steve gives life to a thought he can't kill. "They're not going to make it back."

Rhodes has platitudes. Tony has science. Maria has secrets. Sam has optimism. Natasha has experience.

She minutely shakes her head. "They're not."

If that's the knife in his chest, his next words are only a request for her to twist it. "What do you think happened?"

She shakes her head again. "I don't know. But I hope they're dead."

Sharon might be dead. He believes that. Hopes that, as selfish and horrible as it is.

Bucky's not dead. The body downstairs exists as proof enough that HYDRA will do anything, everything to him, except kill him.

Natasha knows all of that, better than any of them. "We won't find them."

It sounds like giving up. Like quitting.

SHIELD only found him, because HYDRA invited them to Death Valley with a fake voicemail.

It sounds like truth.

***

Safe on the ground, Sharon disengages the parachute and unhooks herself from Barnes. She untangles herself from the mess of limbs and fabric and stumbles free and clear onto a moonlit, gravel road.

Her hand goes to her ear, ready to tap her earbud and make a sweet call to JARVIS.

She pushes her tragus against an empty ear canal: it's gone.

Either somewhere in the Cosmodrome, or lost in the jump from the jet.

_God damn it._

Before her, miles of forest stretch along miles of meadow. To the north, a blank, empty road leading to anywhere. To the south, another blank, empty road leading to anywhere.

South is the best bet, in case they've landed too far north and too far from assured civilization. South is a guarantee of a village, a town: vehicles, shelter.

A dense mist of rain carries on a gust of wind. The parachute blows backward toward the river.

"No!"

Sharon chases after it and catches the edge of its cord at the last possible second. She pulls it back to land, but the bulk of the fabric is already drenched in cold, heavy water. More to carry.

"Fucking great," she breathes, while that rain turns from mist to fast, thick drops. They feel like heaven against the sunburnt, cracked skin of her face.

Sharon drops the parachute and her weapons. She wades into the enticingly cool blanket of water and skims her face across the surface. The wrinkled, peeling skin of her burnt hands and face prickles. Better judgment be damned, she cups water into her hands and drinks, again and again and again, taking every sliver of relief it offers.

Sharon dunks herself full under the water, pretending that her skin is drinking it in and rehydrating itself to normal. It'd be nice if that's how it worked.

After a few more satiating drinks, she trudges out of the river, her body reacting with hollow, shivering chills. The drugs, heat exhaustion, the burns, the stress – all of it works against her, with miles and miles to go.

She looks to Barnes and wills him to  _wake up._ He doesn't, of course.

On the gravel road, Sharon lays the parachute out flat, then drags Barnes onto it. She wraps it around him and ties a few knots, planning for it to be able to carry him at least a few miles before ripping to shreds.

She takes a hold of the parachute's straps and heads south down the road, pulling his 180-something pounds of weight behind her.

It's perfectly, eerily quiet, save for the gentle chirps and rustles from nighttime creatures. Until now, she had never noticed the ubiquitous white noise of the world: whooshing cars, humming engines, rumbling generators, hissing valves, and the disquiet of eight billion voices.

In the silence, she can hear every one of Barnes' breaths, every scrape of stone against the thick fabric of the parachute, and every movement of every rock under her boots.

Without city lights, the stars stretch to the horizon, tinged yellow-purple by the rise of the Milky Way.

It's no secret that Barnes liked it here. She understands why. Even with HYDRA a few hundred miles away, and even with the threat of HYDRA possibly tracking them here, the peaceful serenity wraps around her.

Barely an hour into her walk, she comes upon a long, shadowed driveway leading to a two-story house. Two vehicles sit parked near a garage. She can hardly see the house, but she knows it's perfect, especially with those vehicles.

Down the drive, up the porch, Sharon kicks in the front door, untangles Barnes from the tattered parachute, and drags him inside by way of his left arm.

"This is where your day gets better," she huffs, as she deposits him onto a dust-covered blue sofa. She pulls a moth-eaten, warm wool blanket from a chair and covers him with it. "Enjoy the couch."

With another quick check of his pulse and breathing—still slow, still strong—Sharon props the front door closed, clears the house for threats, and deposits herself in an upstairs bedroom.

She doesn't dare take off any of her clothes or gear, even though every inch of her body is drenched in water and sweat. Though she doubts they will, HYDRA could find them at any moment. Barnes could wander up here, although she doubts that, too.

She lays atop the covers and doesn't intend to sleep. She does, though: the sedatives in her system eat away at her adrenaline and drive to get through this ordeal. More than a doze, less than a deep sleep, she slips into tumbles of dreams and fantastical flights of thoughts.

Sharon wakes to daylight streaming through someone else's windows and to the barrel of her nine-millimeter handgun looming inches from her face. It's held in a bruised, blood-crusted hand, by a person with  _kill?_ scribbled on his face.

If he was going to do it, he already would have.

Fearless, she says, "Barnes. I'm not here to fuck around with you."

As simple as that, his head jerks, and he blinks, eyebrows crunching in confused recognition. "It hur…" His voice fails.

With a steady, facile hand, she lowers the handgun. He lets it fall to his side, then clatter to the hardwood floor.

It's only then, with the threat eliminated, that Sharon sits up and notices his entire body is shaking from the inside out. His eyes are glassy, heavy-lidded – and more bloodshot than white, pupils blown so wide and black that she can barely see the blue of his irises. He blinks, a full second passing between his eyes closing and opening again.

Whatever it is that HYDRA injected into him, he's fighting it and losing.

He slumps down to the floor, paying Sharon no mind when she rolls off the bed and kicks the handgun across the room.

She trusts him any other day but today, and she'll tell him that to his face, should he ask. Those drugs mean he's liable to snap and kill someone. She's the only someone around.

He keels over: dead to the world, three sedated sheets to the wind, flat out fucking  _out of it_.

Sharon pushes the toe of her boot into his sternum and gives it a little rub. Nothing. "Just checking."

She leaves him on the floor, retrieves her sidearm, finds the bathroom, and rummages around until she finds a pretty paper box full of basic first-aid items. From it, she only takes a large tube of hydrocortisone cream, a roll of gauze, and tape.

Back in the bedroom, she sits next to him and takes his right hand. Everything she's seen on him is bad, but his hand is the worst. Although his serum is already attacking the wounds—knitting together broken skin, taking the edge off the intense bruising—it'll be days before they're fully healed, if he's anything like Steve.

She runs a zig-zag line of cream around his wrist and wraps it, then quickly does the same to his skinned hand.

The quiet silence is too much to bear. "You can't hear me, but I can hear me. The plan is to drive to the transit site. Remember the one Stark was all excited about at that briefing?"

As she rolls the gauze around his hand, she feels abnormal movement in his second MCP and fifth PIP joints – broken.

She glances at his silver left arm and sees a maglock restraint around that wrist; given that, it doesn't take a genius to figure out how he'd hurt his right hand.

"You're stuck with those restraints, until we get home. Takes a special key."

Sharon moves on to his forehead and cheekbone, sticking with the cream and not bothering with the gauze. She skips his neck and ankles: those restraints are buried in his healing skin, and she won't be surprised if he has a laryngeal fracture. That's not for her to mess with.

Out of curiosity, she picks her phone out of her vest pocket and scans the blood swathed on his right arm. The results screen indicates  _"inconclusive: Barnes, James B. or Romanoff, Natasha_ ," photos and biographical information for them both provided underneath.

Sharon scans another area of blood, and then another, and another: those three are all Natasha's.

None of it belongs to Steve. As she thinks about it, she realizes: she'd stolen his jet. He'd only been there for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes.

That means…

Two of Steve. Two of Barnes. Two of Natasha somehow makes sense. And lends a bit more sense to what she'd found in Barnes' pants. She can't imagine that – Not her business. Not her right.

With that much of her blood on him, it's obvious that Natasha is dead. It's not her business to surmise, but. But.

She pockets the phone, pulls her knees to her chest, and lets the last day—or two or three—settle.

In many ways, she doesn't expect home to be what it's been for the past two months. She doesn't expect  _him_ to be what he's been for the past ten.

She thinks of Steve inside that building, shame heating her face, and looks to Barnes. "They take—"

The hairs on the back of her neck raise. The air changes. Her instincts speak to her, loudly.

Sharon flicks her eyes to Barnes: he's still out. It's not him.

No more time wasted, Sharon darts across the room to her sidearm. As she lunges for it, she rolls, then grabs it, as she twists her body toward the southerly windows.

She takes aim as the two windows shatter—and as four black-clad, helmeted soldiers swing into the room from the roof.

Four assault rifles aimed at her, Sharon drops her sidearm and raises her hands, never,  _never_ so happy to see people with SHIELD emblems on their uniforms. And: never,  _ever_ so happy to see War Machine hovering outside.

The assault rifles don't lower. "Agent Carter, identify Code Sierra."

Funny: she  _almost_ forgets the random words. "Rainbow, turtle, boat, singer."

The assault rifles lower, while the strike team lead—Rinna, if she recalls correctly—radios good news to Rhodes.

 _How_ is a decent question, though she figures: JARVIS picked up a glimmer of a signal from her earbud, and then likely from her phone. Only JARVIS.

Confirming that doesn't matter, not so much as: "HYDRA's at the Cosmodrome,  _right now_. The other Steve is there. What are you waiting for? We're good here."

Rhodes floats in close to a window and dares to ask, "You sure?"

 _About what?_ stands as a retort. Rhodes being who he is: there'd be no excuse for that. "I'm sure, Colonel."

For the first time in months,  _we can end this_ stands as a possibility.

***

Sam's fingers nervously dance across his thighs.

Across from him, strapped into a jumpseat with a saline IV secured to her hand, a majorly sunburnt, bruised, bloody, and dirty Sharon somehow sleeps.

Below him, on the floor, a highly-trained super assassin with the slimmest of hair triggers is in a drug-induced, HYDRA-haze. Although he's purportedly asleep, any second, his eyes might snap open, and, any second, he might  _snap_.

It's not Barnes. It's not his friend. Not right now.

Sam watches him, a word prepared to leave his lips at a moment's notice.

" _If it stops me from killing you, you use it. I'm glad you have it."_  Good advice.

The jet lands on the base's roof, the ramp lowering at the command of the pilot. Outside, a medical team waits with a gurney for both Sharon and Barnes. While Barnes doesn't have a choice, Sharon refuses.

Side by side, Sam and Sharon take the damaged stairs down to Medical, beating the team's elevator there by six seconds.

Steve meets them in the hallway – drained, tired, worried, relieved. "Hey."

Sharon holds his eyes. "Hey, Steve."

A medic leads her away.

Sam pats Steve's shoulder. "Everything's okay. They're here."

He knows it's not. He knows Natasha is still recovering back in Medical; he knows Banner is still missing somewhere in the forest; he knows they lost fifteen of their people; he knows the base is wrecked; and he knows Rhodes, Tony, and a strike team are on-ground in the Cosmodrome right this second.

If HYDRA had their way, Sharon would be dead, and Barnes would be getting rebooted. Sam reminds himself of that: this is a good day, better than it could have been.

The gurney rolls past, Cho behind it. "Take him to the surgical suite. We'll evaluate the injuries there."

Sam knows that's the appropriate step to take, and he knows Barnes' serum is healing problems into his skin, but. If he wakes up, and if he's spooked enough, more people are going to die.

"Before we do that, can I talk to you, Dr. Cho?" Sam requests, intentionally dumping a pile of urgency into his tone. "I have information you might like to know about."

Cho holds a hand out and stops the gurney from going any further down the hall. Ahead, Sharon stops, too. "Yes?"

"What is it?" Steve asks, attention darting between Sam, Cho, and Sharon. "Is he okay?"

Out here, with all these people, he doesn't want to say it. "In private? It's just a concern. I'm sure he's fine, Cap. It's no big deal."

Steve gives Sam a skeptical look. "Then why does it sound like it's not going to be that easy?"

Sam opens his mouth to wind this down. The problem is that Barnes can move faster than any of them, including Steve, and the bigger problem is that Barnes is off the gurney, on his feet, with his left hand wrapped around Steve's throat.

Snap.

"This. This was it," Sam deadpans, no damned way in hell he's getting between those two. "This was the concern."

Steve lets Barnes push him back against the elevator doors, while his face turns redder and redder. Barnes' right fist sails at Steve's face, but Steve catches it and struggles to hold it off.

"B-b-buck," he sputters, barely getting the name past his lips. " _Stop_."

Barnes does  _not_  stop. He rams Steve into the doors, once, twice, three times, each time bending the doors a little bit further in – until they give, and Barnes brutally kicks Steve down the shaft with a loud, resounding  _BANG!_

Cho has a syringe in her hand, apparently thinking she'll get close enough to use it - without getting killed.

Barnes turns, eyes not quite blank but nowhere near  _here_ , and focuses on the nameplate attached to the wall. Cho's on there. So is Shirin. Eicher, too, still. The moment Barnes recognizes it is clear; he even looks back at the elevator, not so much confused as concerned.

"Did…" Barnes cuts himself off.

"B. You're ho—"

_Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH!_

Emergency klaxons. Someone pulled the alarm.

Barnes' concern bleeds away into hard, fearful anger.

No one in this room wins this fight.

Sam decides. "Sput—"

Fearless, Sharon steps a hand's grasp away from Barnes. "Barnes. I'm not fucking around with you today."

The anger vanishes into recognition. Barnes scours her face for answers to unvoiced questions. Unwavering, she looks at him intensely, while his eyes slip past her and crawl around the room.

_Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH!_

Sam can see him shift around puzzle pieces, desperately trying to make sense of things; if only Sam could see what the assembled puzzle looks like, because it can't possibly be whole.

Sam will say it: he'll say the switch-off word, and he won't damn care that he did. It's just… If he can avoid it, he'll do that, too.

_Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH!_

Barnes focuses on Sam, something clicking into place. "Is this…"

It's as if he's afraid to dare say "home."

"Yeah, you're home," Sam answers, then: "Your hair's fucking amazing."

Another blink, and a small sigh that unwinds the tiniest piece of tension. So much better than Sam ever,  _ever_ expected.

"Do you want to get taken care of in Medical, or do you want to go upstairs?" Sharon asks.

Barnes answers by pushing the "up" button on the elevator. Despite the door alarm blaring and the nice lady's voice repeating "error, error, error." Despite Steve being at the bottom. Despite all that  _just happening._

_Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH!_

"No, man, you broke it. Remember?"

Barnes pushes the button again, and then again – looking more and more tired each time it fails to call. He's higher than a kite, but at least he's done being an out of control asshat about it.

Sharon dares to take his right elbow in her hand and give him a little tug. "The stairs work. Are you hungry?"

_Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH! Wah-WAH!_

He doesn't answer, but he walks all the way to the stairwell, up four flights of oddly smashed stairs, and to his room without complaint.

He remembers to glance up at the optic sensor for access, and he lets Sharon purposefully lead him past the sofa and into his bedroom. He collapses on top of the covers, face immediately buried in a pillow.

"Can the med staff come in and help you?"

Sam holds back a snort: there aren't any staff left who are  _willing_ to do that.

That's okay, though, because Barnes is already dead-to-the-world unconscious, not something Sam would call "sleep."

Sam allows himself a single moment of anger at this situation, before purposefully reminding himself  _they're back, they're safe._

Sharon and Steve are fine.

Barnes and Natasha will be.

With Barnes down, Sharon shows a fleeting spurt of anxious worry. For over three days, this has been all on her.

"He'll sleep it off. Being here will help," Sam says. "Trust me. I have the t-shirt."

With the release of a deep breath, Sharon nods her head. "I'll see if Cho can come up."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

She catches his eyes and jerks her head toward the living room. Sam follows her into the hallway instead, the door clicking closed behind them.

"Natasha and Steve did this. The last thing he did was run from Steve, before Steve shot him with a sedative. I saw it."

That puts the elevator thing into perspective. "You know you could have led with that, right? Also: there's another Natasha?"

Sharon's lips press thin. "It's her blood on him. I'll get Cho. Stay with him?"

He doesn't feel as surprised as he should. Sharon leaves, and he wanders into the bathroom. He puts his hands on Barnes' jar of hair cream, as well as a stack of white towels, then heads back into the bedroom.

"JARVIS, what did he watch last?"

"He last watched  _The Real Housewives of New York City_."

He's got no words for that and hopes Tony never, ever finds out.

"JARVIS, play a book he's listened to on an unending loop. Don't stop until he says so."

Sam unscrews the cap, a pleasant, fruity scent releasing with the lid. He drops the towels on the bed and sets the open jar on the nightstand, while a neutral voice begins to read  _Jurassic Park_.

Sam sits on the edge of the bed. Although he doesn't trust that Barnes won't pop awake again and snap in half, he's a bit more confident that Barnes has enough control to not snap random people in half.

"You're home, you know," Sam says. "You made it back."

The likelihood is that Barnes doesn't hear a single word of it; Sam would like to think a part of him did, though, and he would like to think that little part has a voice big enough to calm the rest of him down.

Sharon comes back with an exasperated Cho, who stands above the bed with tired eyes. "The skin is already healing around the metal. It's going to be messy and painful. You're asking me to do this here?"

Sharon looks to Sam, who has apparently become the expert on formerly brainwashed, hair-trigger HYDRA assassins.

"He's less likely to freak out here, but he's still dangerous. If you don't want to do this, I will," Sam offers, even though he'd much rather run out of this apartment, lock the door behind him, and hide somewhere Barnes will never find.

Cho sighs and drops her medical bag on the bed. "I'm sedating him. I'll remove the restraints, treat the lacerations, and let him sleep it all off. JARVIS can remotely monitor his vitals."

In the space of seconds, Cho snaps on blue gloves, takes an IV line out of her bag, and has it inserted into a blue vein on the underside of Barnes' right arm. With that taped securely in place, she draws a small blood sample and runs it through a portable scanner.

Even as she watches her tablet's screen for the results, Cho adheres a biosensor patch to Barnes' upper neck, nearly behind his ear. Sam peeks at the tablet screen as the vitals come through: respiration low, heart rate low, blood pressure low.

The tox screen results replace the vitals. With a frown, Cho says, "Well, he should be dead. JARVIS, send these results to the laboratory for analysis. We'll try a high dose of antihistamine. It's the least contraindicated sedative I have."

Cho injects half of a large syringe of clear liquid into the IV, while Sam slides towels under Barnes' ankles and head. Cho leaves the half-full syringe inserted into the IV.

Burnt arms crossed, Sharon only watches from near the windows.

None of them notice Bruce Banner walk naked across the grounds, hands rubbing at his eyes.

Cho takes the maglock key, a pouch of clean scalpels, a box of gauze pads, and a suture kit from her bag. She unlocks the maglock around his neck first. It unlatches but, like Cho said, the skin has already healed around the metal. She takes one of the scalpels and begins cutting.

Sam can't watch it, so he watches Barnes' face instead, waiting for him to roar up. If Barnes feels it, he doesn't show it. Cho made right call with the antihistamine.

"JARVIS, scan his trachea and larynx and send an injury report to my tablet."

Sam makes the mistake of looking at what she's talking about. Enough of the maglock is peeled away, and enough skin has gone with it that Sam can see the bumpy, white cartilage of Barnes' throat.

"His airway appears intact. That's a good sign," Cho says, though Sam isn't sure if she's talking to them or to herself. "JARVIS, scan his cervical spine, too."

Cho peels the maglock away with one hand, a bloody scalpel in the other. She holds out the maglock for Sam to take, while blood trickles onto the white towel.

Sam takes the restraint, wraps it in another towel, and pushes it toward the foot of the bed. He wants nothing to do with it. He looks back toward Cho but instead sees Barnes' open eyes, pupils blown as wide as a cat's on crack. His right hand is a fist, and his left arm  _whirs_.

Cho holds perfectly, intensely still, except for her left hand – which slowly creeps toward the syringe and its extra dose of antihistamine.

Although Sam calmly holds Barnes' eyes, he feels like he's caught a wasp's nest in his hands. "It's us, B. We've got you."

Barnes mutters something, probably in Russian, that sounds like "yeah hostel."

"English, man. English." Sam can't keep a shake out of his voice. It's too much like Jesenice: creepy Russian passphrases and a person too far gone.

"Go to sleep, then," Sharon replies, not a speck of bullshit in sight. "You're in your bed. Go to sleep."

Barnes says something else, something different, still not in English, that sounds like nothing Sam recognizes.

Sharon understands it. "When Dr. Cho is done helping you, I'll bring blankets. JARVIS, set the temperature for 75 Fahrenheit and cut the AC." Sharon's eyes flick to Sam. "He said he's tired and cold."

Cho depresses the syringe all the way to the finger grips. Whether because of that or Sharon's instructions, Barnes closes his eyes and relaxes his hand.

Sam lets out a held breath.

Cho gets back to work, carefully suturing the broken skin around his entire neck, before covering it all with clear Tegaderm film.

Cho works much faster on his ankles, leaving them sutured and covered with the same clear film. Afterward, she pulls an orange biohazard bag out of her supplies, shakes it open, and deposits all of the towels, gauze, skin, and her own gloves inside of it.

"That's it?" Sharon asks.

It's been nearly two hours; it damn well better be  _it_.

"We're monitoring his vitals. So long as he holds steady, the best thing we can do for him is let him sleep off the substances. Preferably, that would happen in Medical under expert supervision. You both brought him here."

"He chose," Sharon defensively responds. "He's calm."

"Yes, I understand that," Cho replies. "Agent Carter, please come with me to Medical for a physical and bloodwork of your own. Agent Wilson, do as you please."

Sharon follows Cho out of the room. "Make sure he's warm," she tosses back to Sam.

She's gotten protective, Sam thinks. He'd never thought those two as field partners made any sense at all, but they're actually good for each other.

Sam looks to Barnes, who's a damn sight better now than he was two hours ago. He undoes Barnes' pants and pulls them off his pliable body, then carefully does the same with his t-shirt. He maneuvers Barnes under the covers and leaves him there.

"JARVIS, scan for weapons and tell me where they are."

Sam leaves the apartment with four sidearms, a rifle, and six knives. In the hallway, he ignores Steve and gives instructions to JARVIS. "Lock the door. Don't let him out."

Sitting on the floor, Steve closes his eyes and knocks his head into the wall.

It's as Sam is checking Barnes' weapons into a temporary armory locker that word comes back from Rhodes and Tony: their Cosmodrome mission was a bust, with three more dead SHIELD agents – but with the retrieval of the bodies of Nick Fury and Natasha Romanoff.

Sam absorbs the news by sitting on a nearby wooden bench, head burrowed in his hands.

***

Only two excruciating days later, with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, Sam sits next to Steve on the floor.

"Shirin's looking for you," Sam comments, only as an informational item. No one expects Steve to be anywhere else but where he is, even if he should be.

"Eight people burned alive and eleven others were killed. I can wait."

Sam could argue but doesn't. "What's he doing?"

Steve tilts his tablet toward Sam. Dressed in his own clothes—jeans, t-shirt, his typical jacket, smiley face socks—Barnes is sitting upright on the couch, hands in his lap, hologram off, completely still.

"We only have camera access in this room. He woke up about five hours ago and came out here about two hours ago." Steve looks at the door across from them, as if Barnes is going to teleport from the screen to there. "What's next?"

Sam sips coffee. "He'll get like a real angry wasp."

Unpredictable. Fast. Lethal. Most of all: confused, afraid, and pissed.

"What if he's...that again."

Steve only means one thing:  _HYDRA. What if he's HYDRA again_.

Emphatic, Sam replies, "He's not. Everyone wants to push you down an elevator shaft. He had a good excuse to get away with it."

Steve doesn't laugh.

"He's going to be fine, Cap."

Even as he says it, Sam realizes that he doesn't know if that's true, but not for the reason Steve thinks.

Sam's seen him lucid twice now, and he knows he's not brainwashed. He's scared, and his brain won't work the way it's supposed to, but he's not brainwashed.

"We're no closer to stopping this than we were in January." Steve doesn't sound passionate or upset, only resigned. "Next time, maybe they don't make it back. Or you. Or Natasha."

That's all a real possibility, and that's all the danger of working with family. Steve won't survive it.

"Tony's working on that, man. It won't happen again."

On the screen, Barnes tips over sideways, so that he's laying down. He looks drunk.

Although Steve tenses with worry, the JARVIS-provided vitals on the bottom of the screen are all within normal. Respiration ticks down a few numbers, followed by the pulse rate, before evening out at still-normal numbers.

"Look, he's sleeping. I can stay and watch; let you know if anything changes," Sam offers. "It could be a while until he's back."

Stubborn, Steve shakes his head. "I helped do this. I'm not leaving."

Finally, a fight Sam is okay picking. "Oh? You wanna go to tell Nat that she helped do this, too? Or does that logic only apply to you?"

With a sigh, Steve lets Sam have that one by forfeit. He should've kept that appointment with Shirin.

"I'm not leaving," Steve argues.

Sam stretches out his legs and laces his fingers behind his head. "Me neither."

Time sluggishly passes without any hurry. Barnes doesn't twitch a finger, move a muscle, or say a single word. It's worse than watching paint dry: nothing damn happens for two and a half more hours.

Sam is dozing when Steve juts an elbow into Sam's side and gestures his chin toward the tablet. Barnes has already rolled off the couch onto unsteady, dizzy feet. He comes straight at the door.

Sam bats away a burst of panic: the door is locked, and he can't get out.

The handle turns and shakes. On the tablet screen, Barnes looks up at an optic reader that doesn't exist on that side of the door. He tries the handle again.

"JARVIS, let him out," Steve orders.

Steve. A God damn person who God damn knows better. Sam doesn't know if he should run from Barnes or break his hand smacking Steve in the head.

The handle turns.

In comical unison, they both scramble to their feet.

" _He threw you down an elevator shaft_ ," Sam hisses.

Steve lights Sam up with a fiery glare. It's  _almost_  scary. "We're not locking him in a fucking room like that."

The door opens. Barnes walks out.

Bleary, he regards them both—but mostly Steve. Sam almost expects Barnes to provide some mysterious Russian passphrase, but he doesn't, not at all.

Voice hoarse, he asks in English, "Is this real?"

Using Barnes' advice about relaxing before firing a sidearm, Sam intentionally relaxes his body. He's done this before, and he's not about to play another game of  _Scooby Doo, Where are You?_

Lips pressed together in his best Peyton Manning impression, Steve nods. "It's real, Buck. You're home. Sharon's fine."

He's shivering, Sam notices. He's personally witnessed the guy run around the Arctic without breaking into a single goosebump, but now he's cold while standing in a temperature-controlled hallway and wearing a wool jacket.

He's in emotional shock.

Confused, Barnes drops his eyebrows, head shaking. "That doesn't make sense."

"Well, you slept for nearly three days," Steve points out, all Captain America. It's good to hear that voice. "How are you feeling? Are you cold?"

Barnes ignores the questions. His eyes ping-pong between them. "I'm not gonna flip out or whatever. You can… I don't know."

Sam snorts under his breath, "If you say so."

Barnes either doesn't hear him or ignores him. He waves a hand at them, then turns and wanders down the hallway – towards Natasha's apartment.

Sam shares a glance with Steve; together, they trail behind Barnes like two bad '80's detectives without a cool theme song.

Barnes goes straight to Natasha's door and knocks four times – nothing combative, merely a couple regular knocks.

Everything he's said and everything he's done so far is so impeccably appropriate that it borders on inappropriate. Mostly, it's the other stuff that worries Sam: the shivering, the shellshock, the confusion. He's still coming down, and his system is still jacked.

The door opens. Natasha stands uneasily in the doorway, still stubbornly recovering from her own ordeal. "Good—"

"Can I come in?"

The moment Natasha gives him a nonverbal go-ahead, he brushes past her and disappears into her living room. Without saying anything, she questions Sam and Steve –  _is he good?_

Sam shakes his head "no" – he's in shock, he's exhausted and confused, he's not himself. It's a risk for her.

Steve nods "yes" – meaning that Barnes is good enough.

Natasha rolls her eyes at them and closes the door.

***

By the time Natasha closes the door, James has already settled on the sofa, covered by two blankets with his knees pulled up. The mottled-purple, stitched-together skin of his neck is goosebumped, and he visibly shivers. Probably why Sam said he wasn't doing okay.

Before joining him, Natasha grabs a pack of scented wax from the dining table and asks JARVIS to put on any episode of  _ER_ on the TV.

Natasha eases down next to him, superficial, dull pain shooting up her chest. She ensures their bodies touch and wraps her hand around the back of his neck. His shoulders draw up and crash down, an audible groan grumbling from his throat. That's not all: he tips over, head planting in her lap.

Natasha slides her hand through his hair, fingernails running along his scalp, time and time again. Whatever it does for him, that's great; for her, it calms her, grounds her, reassures her that they're all safe, home, and here.

She watches him inhale a hushed breath, eyes welling and turning red.

"I don't understand how I'm here."

Natasha explains everything she knows from Sharon's AAR – finding James, stealing the jet, staying the night in Finland, JARVIS picking up enough of a signal to locate them. The timing of it all is a hard swallow, and, from his perspective, an unimaginable miracle.

She doesn't mention that Rhodes and Tony had taken a strike team to the Cosmodrome. HYDRA had stuck around long enough to engage in a mini-war – and long enough that they were able to bring two bodies home, to add to the collection in the morgue.

_Did she do this to you?_

_Did you kill her?_

Natasha doesn't want to know. Not today.

"You might owe Sharon a drink or two," she says, using his reaction to gauge his head space.

Based on the complete lack of said reaction, he's spiraling.

For an episode and a half, he stares at the TV screen, while she methodically pets his hair, sinks comfortably into the sofa, and dozes.

A door somewhere in the hallway  _slams_  closed. She startles awake, at the same time James flinches and protects the top of his right hand with his left. Though lucid, he's not altogether present – and, she presumes, he's still cycling through all of the ways this outcome can't be real.

Natasha drops him her anchor. "You're safe. You're home. You're here."

His right hand tightens around her calf. His eyes close. Two infinitesimal signals that he trusts her with this.

A mantra, she repeats the phrases in every language she knows— _safe, home, here_ —while she keeps stroking his hair. The shivering gradually diminishes, until he's warm, mollified, and asleep.

The hours tick by, and they're both safe, home, and here.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 12: Sunny By Noon._

/***/

Near Six, his watch beeps with a message from Cho: _“Blood test is positive. Come back next Wednesday at 0730.”_

Eyes closed, he sags against the wall and tries to push away a heap of frustration. It’s been two months, and HYDRA’s still in his system.

Livid, Barnes leaves a hand-sized dent in the door for Seven.

And comes face to face with a startled Sam. “Bad morning?”

Barnes takes a deep, steadying breath, ready to tear Sam apart a limb at a time. “Mo—”

Hands raised in mock surrender, Sam interjects, “Let’s go for a walk—down by the pond. It’s beautiful outside.”

Barnes steps forward, intentionally intimidating. “Why the fuck would I want to do that?”

Sam stands his ground. “No one here’s scared of you.  You eat Nutella straight from a fucking jar.  You wear polka dot socks.  And, I swear to God, you have a secret Cyndi Lauper playlist.”

That’s – mostly true.

Sam continues: “So. Why the fuck would you not?”

“Because fuck you.” Barnes sidesteps around Sam and moves toward his room. All he wants is to slide under the covers in his bed and hide.

“Really?” Sam laughs, though he’s far from amused and further from happy. “You know, you must really be hurting.”

That’s a classic line for therapists to use to avoid engaging in arguments with overly defensive clients. Barnes has _read it_ , in one of the books Naceri leant him.

“Don’t fucking therapy me,” he snaps without looking back at Sam.

“Stop fucking being a person I miss, when you’re standing right the fuck in front of me. How ‘bout that.”

Some part of that hits as good as a bullet through his chest, and not only because Sam’s speaking his language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	12. Sunny By Noon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Incredulous, Steve blurts "you are nowhere near fine and you fucking know it" and reacts without thinking: he stops and grabs Bucky's right arm to make him stop walking, too. It's a testament to how high-strung and not fine Bucky is that Bucky twists around, breaks the grab, and slams his left hand into Steve's chest.
> 
> Steve lets Bucky aggressively walk them both off the shoulder, across the ditch and through a straggly tree line, until Steve's back thumps against the thick trunk of an old maple. The wood audibly splinters. Brown leaves fall.
> 
> Two months have passed since the base attack and disastrous mission that left Barnes and Sharon stranded in HYDRA's Arctic. In the meantime, a lot of people have lost good money on the over-under of Barnes vanishing into the night. What is home, and what does it mean to make it back?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: discussion of non-con.

"Now what?"

Alievi's right wrist is caught in Barnes' left hand, her poised combat knife worthless. She punches at his right kidney, nice and hard but not overly helpful against people like him.

That would be good advice:  _don't give up your weapon, when your hands can't beat your opponent._ What comes out of his mouth is, "I'm not trying to steal your fucking purse. Try again."

Without even as much as a frustrated huff, Alievi changes tactics: spinning around, throwing her back into his front, and propelling herself over his head. Or so she tries.

Barnes uses his free hand to whap her back down and his other hand to drive her own knife into her throat. Hard. The rubber tip will leave a bruise.

She twists back around, facing him, now visibly frustrated.

Good advice would be:  _that's dangerous when your opponent can control your weapon._ What comes out of his mouth is, "This isn't gymnastics class. Drop the knife out of your hand—" He takes her left hand and positions it under her right. "—and catch it with this one."

The dummy knife slips through her right hand into her waiting left. Puzzle solved, she mimes slicing his neck open. She might want to at this point.

He lets her go. "Everyone, grab a partner and practice."

All twelve of the trainees seem pretty happy to do so, likely because it means he's not going to pick on one of them individually. Good for fucking them.

He has the class spend their last five minutes practicing their defensive knife skills by way of sparring. He sees room for corrections, guidance, and even praise, but he doesn't trust himself to give any of it.

At 0900 on the dot, he takes off from the training room before any of the trainees do. He feels a few of their eyes gnawing on his back, questions unasked, complaints unspoken. He tells himself he doesn't care: this is all temporary.

He takes the stairs to Medical for  _god fucking please_  his last blood draw.

Right arm held out, vulnerable fleshy side up and exposed, Cho draws the blood herself, an even quicker sit-down-see-you-later-bye than last week.

Not curt or cold, but simply neutral and direct, Cho says, "I'll have the results emailed to you by the afternoon." She slicks a fabric band-aid across the needle prick. "Excuse me."

She disappears into the guts of Medical, where only authorized personnel are supposed to be.

No time for "sorry," even if he'd felt like saying it. At night, alone, he crafts apologies. In the day, face to face, vindictive petulance wins. And works. He tells himself he doesn't care, because this is all temporary.

Even if his blood comes back clean, he's still got one more level of this clusterfuck to clear: Naceri.

"Have you talked to anyone about the Cosmodrome? Steve? Natasha? Sam? Sharon? Yourself?"

Unusually direct and discouraged, today's the last chance, or so Naceri threatens. She keeps saying that, but he so much doubts Maria would actually pull his plug. Permanently grounding him means permanently pulling in someone else, like Tony or Rhodes, and they're not going to commit to that.

He doesn't know if he's willing to commit to that bet. Even if this is all temporary.

Elbows on knees, Barnes leans forward. "There's seventy years of shit to roll through, which didn't matter to any of you before July. Why is this so much more important?"

Naceri mirrors his posture, damn near nose-to-nose with him. "Because several people have mentioned a palpable change in you since July. I agree, and I see it. What are your thoughts about that?"

 _Fucking rats_.

He leans back and jerks her chain, sounding more barbed than he wants – but, all in all, not caring. "Is that what you and Steve talk about?"

Naceri leans back in her chair, inscrutable. "You know I can't discuss that, just as I can't discuss with him what we talk about."

"Right."

It seems to jar her more than anything else he's ever said. Questioning someone's ethics isn't cool, or so Sam would say.

Not that he takes it back. She's not going to clear him, which makes these 60 minutes very fucking pointless. He can burn this relationship to the bitter ground, and it won't matter in the least.

Naceri checks her notepad. "We met thirteen times before the July mission and nine since. Captain Rogers, nor anyone else, needed to say anything. It's almost as if you're a different client."

Of any of this, he likes her honesty the most. He doesn't say that. "Guess HYDRA brainwashed me again. Whoops."

She smiles, in lieu of laughing. "I'm not writing that down, but it's nice that you can admit that. Tell me one word about the before and the after."

That's her favorite bullshit game. None of this matters – but, as he combs through his available bank of languages to assign one word to the time since July, he experiences a microscopic sense of solace.

Therapy works, when he lets it. Before July, he hadn't minded coming. He might've looked forward to it.

"Lebensmüde."

She looks amused. "That's cheating, if you don't say what it means."

He gives it to her; nicely, even. "Recklessly tired. They call it 'life-tired,' but not the way you would interpret it."

She raises her eyebrows:  _how would I interpret it?_

"Done with life. I'm not."

That's the thing about her kind of therapy: until this second, he hadn't realized he  _wasn't_ done with life.

He chews on the corner of his tongue with an incisor, while he sorts through what it is, then. All he's got is a rough, half-drawn idea that he wants to scream until the world disintegrates around him.

If he says that, Maria probably  _will_  bench him.

"I'm sick of myself," he realizes. "There's a different word for that."

 _That_ gets her wheels turning – genuinely no pun intended, what with the chair and all.

"You know what I think? And I know you'll tell me off if I'm wrong," Naceri accurately says. "I used to work in a state hospital. They're like the old institutions. The most severe cases we had—the ones who needed restrained, or heavily medicated, or what have you—made ways to take back their power."

Barnes glances at the pearly scar that covers his first knuckle. It's harder to see since he'd skinned his hand in July, but he can make it out. Taking back power, any way possible, even if it meant biting his own skin off. Or, more recently, skinning that hand and breaking bone.

Another word for July:  _close_. So close. Close like the Cosmodrome in September 2016, another time in the same place, when he still doesn't know how he'd made it out.

"You were incapacitated and powerless. You survived by what you would call luck. You can't control HYDRA. You can't control SHIELD."

That hits. In 2016, he'd told Fury where to find the Cosmodrome. SHIELD didn't even step foot there, not then and not even again in April this year. Maybe it's god damn, flat out infuriating that –  _that_ had to happen.

 _It would've been somewhere else_ , a much more rational part of him thinks. But it wouldn't have been  _there_.

"All you can do is control you, and, sometimes, if you spew just the right shit, you can control your friends and coworkers. It feels good, doesn't it? Really good?"

That's what the rats told her: tattle-tale, playground politics. He's pushed and pushed and pissed them all off – except for Banner, Stark, and Sharon. Even he knows not to tempt the Hulk; Stark is still Howard's kid; and he owes Sharon something more than his life.

"Am I close?" Naceri asks.

Closer than he'd known. "Am I grounded?"

Tone carefully measured, she replies, "Director Hill and I spoke yesterday. And yes, unless you're ready to tell me what happened in July. Only if you're ready. It's an operational decision for mission logistics; it's not meant to pressure you."

Exactly what he's been hearing  _since_  July. Weeks ago, she'd asked him to write something called a trauma narrative; he'd thrown away the blank sheet of paper.

"But I know that you want back out there," she says.

HYDRA has a version of Steve, who SHIELD has barely tried to find or help or kill. HYDRA has awful technology and has done awful things to SHIELD's people. And HYDRA isn't going to wait for him to get intimate with his feelings. So, yes: he wants back out there.

And, yes: he knows why they won't  _let_  him. Maybe he doesn't need their fucking permission.

Naceri pushes. "It sounds trite, but the most power anyone has over you goes right back to that mission. You bring it with you in every interaction."

Barnes closes his eyes, leans his head as far as it will go over the back of the chair, and wraps his arms around his chest.

It's all or nothing.

Stay or go.

Leave it all behind, or tell a shitty story.

"That place is where they…" Cotton clogs his throat. "…made the Winter Soldier. Natasha was there. She was trying to…"

He picks carefully from the available ways of describing it. Most important of all: her body is in this building, autopsied, dissected, and reported. They know how she died – but they don't know  _how_.

"…bring him back the old fashioned way." An inappropriate laugh almost ruins the story. "I got free. We fought. Steve came. I ran. We fought."

Barnes intentionally omits the part about killing Natasha and trying to kill himself again. He doesn't want to talk about finding Fury and fake-Peggy; that was part of his AAR and all the debriefings.

"I ran. I jumped. He shot me in the neck with the little star thing. Here we are. That was July."

"Hot dogs and fireworks," she says, even as her pencil scratches furiously across her yellow notepad. "What did Natasha use to bring back the Winter Soldier?"

He doesn't want to answer that. "I don't know."

Her silence clearly tells him that he hadn't made that convincing enough. He rubs his right hand over his still-closed eyes.

Funny thing is, he keeps telling himself he doesn't care, that this is all temporary, but the thought of actually leaving, of being back out there all on his own, a single mistake from being  _owned_  – he hates it.

"Some sort of nerve agent that hurts for a long time. Good enough?"

Her pencil finally stops scratching. "Was it the same substance that HYDRA used on you in the '40's and '50's?"

"Yeah," he grinds out. "Is that good enough?"

"You give two more sessions—one more week—like this, and it will be. We have ten minutes left."

He makes a desperate request. "Can we cut it short?"

She hesitates. "Sure."

Without looking at her, he rockets out the door and into the nearest stairwell. He ignores a group of analysts trotting down the stairs and calmly walks past them, going up.

Near Six, his watch beeps with a message from Cho:  _"Blood test is positive. Come back next Monday at 0730."_

Eyes closed, he sags against the wall and tries to push away a heap of frustration. It's been two months, and HYDRA's still in his system.

Livid, Barnes leaves a hand-sized dent in the door for Seven.

And comes face to face with a startled Sam. "Bad morning?"

Barnes takes a deep, steadying breath, ready to tear Sam apart a limb at a time. "Mo—"

Hands raised in mock surrender, Sam interjects, "Let's go for a walk—down by the pond. It's beautiful outside."

Barnes steps forward, intentionally intimidating. "Why the fuck would I want to do that?"

Sam stands his ground. "No one here's scared of you. You eat Nutella straight from a fucking jar. You wear polka dot socks. And, I swear to God, you have a secret Cyndi Lauper playlist."

That's – mostly true.

Sam continues: "So. Why the fuck would you not?"

"Because fuck you." Barnes sidesteps around Sam and moves toward his room. All he wants is to slide under the covers in his bed and hide.

"Really?" Sam laughs, though he's far from amused and further from happy. "You know, you must really be hurting."

That's a classic line for therapists to use to avoid engaging in arguments with overly defensive clients. Barnes has  _read it_ , in one of the books Naceri leant him.

"Don't fucking therapy me," he snaps without looking back at Sam.

"Stop fucking being a person I miss, when you're standing right the fuck in front of me. How 'bout that."

Some part of that hits as good as a bullet through his chest, and not only because Sam's speaking his language. His door  _clicks_  open, but he doesn't go inside.

"B."

Throat inexplicably tight, anxiety tensing his muscles, Barnes turns and knows that Sam won't always be there waiting. "Okay."

Eyebrows popped, Sam confirms, "Okay?"

Barnes nods.

"Let's go."

***

Twigs, dry leaves, and mud-entrenched stones crunch underfoot. Under the sunny, blue September sky, the rippling pond water twinkles. Clusters of slider turtles sunbathe on half-submerged logs. Long-necked geese dunk their heads for food, while a paddling of teal-tipped Mallards scoot along.

"How was today?" Sam asks.

"It was okay," Barnes barely shares. "Naceri's easy to talk to."

"You didn't snap her head off?" Sam questions, not so much joking as he might sound. The past two months have been...challenging. A lot of people have lost good money on the over-under of Barnes vanishing into the night.

"Not entirely."

"Great - you have a nearly headless therapist."

Barnes doesn't smile, but he comes damn close. It'd be good to see one from him again.

"Did you tell Shirin about it?" Sam fishes, hoping for an answer he doubts he's going to hear.

Word from Maria had been that today was it: Barnes plays ball with Shirin, or gets himself indefinitely grounded with Steve. Something about having "asked too much to begin with, all things considered."

A flock of geese touch down on the water, honking and hollering as they skim across the surface. The ducks zip away as quick as can be, quack-quack-quacking as they go.

Impossibly, Barnes nods. "Some of it."

That'll probably be enough to put him back on schedule. Sam doesn't know if that's good or bad, but he  _does_  know that "some of it" more than likely doesn't even begin to cover it.

"It's the rest of it that I'm worried about," Sam challenges.

"Yeah, well, I didn't fucking ask you to be worried."

Sam whistles, while he mimes slicing his throat. "There it goes."

The comment isn't necessary: Barnes cringes, face flushed. Even in the mild September air, he all but shrivels up inside his jacket from Somewhere-on-5th.

"At least you can hear yourself," Sam offers, genuinely meaning it as a positive. "A lot of people can't."

Side by side, they round the far bend of the pond – a shaded, leafy area where brownish-green scum and bits of blown-in trash collect at the bank.

"Sure."

Sam sighs. "Look, man, you've got to talk about it. Whatever it is—"

"No, I don't."

"—it's eating you alive." Sam turns an incredulous, half-angry look to Barnes. " _Seriously_?"

"Nothing happened," Barnes argues, tone flat and less than convincing. "Nothing."

"'Nothing happened.' Okay. Right. You're being a raging jackhole dick for no reason at all," Sam replies, daring Barnes to agree. After several long moments, Barnes doesn't answer, and Sam plows forward. "Whatever happened, you need to talk about it."

Voice raised, Barnes goes off. "Nothing. Fucking. Happened. What do you want to hear? Do you want me to make some shit up?" He throws his hands in the air. "I don't know - here. Steve burned me. They cut me. I was starved."

Sam rolls his eyes, sighs, and keeps walking, while Barnes stops to sing-song a list of horrible, brutal things cherry picked from thin air. None of that happened; Sam knows it for a fact.

"They wouldn't let me sleep. I had to kill people - all sorts of people. Oh, and don't forget: all the fucking pain! What else. She locked me to the floor. We had sex. I killed her."

Sam raises a middle finger and keeps on going. His knee aching, he powers up the steep, inclined grassy bank of the pond, brushing past the bushy tree line. He reaches between vines of poison ivy, plucks a late blackberry off a branch, and pops it in his mouth.

Barnes stops making shit up and puts another spectacular meltdown to rest. Sam hopes it made him feel better, because, at this rate, nothing else God damn will. Maybe they  _should_ send him back out: aim him toward HYDRA and let him explode.

Letting his frustrated impatience show, Sam calls back, "How many punching bags do you need? 'Cause I'm not one of them."

Sam plucks another blackberry off another branch and crosses between two old trees that shed thin sheets of white bark. "You hear me? I'm not one of them."

Sam turns and walks backward, scanning the empty landscape, until he glimpses the top of Barnes' head down the slope, near the edge of the calm, wavy tufts of water.

Sam trots down the slope, his knee bitching and moaning with every dug-in step, and plunks down on the hard ground.

Arms on his knees, hands covering his face, Barnes drops a long-held volley of bombs. "She fucked me while I was unconscious. She was going to do it again. I beat her and killed her. I cut her femoral artery, and she bled to death."

 _Jesus Christ_.

Sam's training as a therapist equips him to hear that and not let it trip him, despite his tumbling, rumbling thoughts.

In this new life since Insight, Sam's not a counselor. He doesn't want to be, not here, and not for these people – his friends, his family. But. This is a chance that Sam can't overlook: Barnes might not otherwise come back, and Sam might not otherwise be able to forgive himself.

Sam puts a grounding hand on Barnes' back. "Who?"

"Who the fuck do you think?"

"Who."

Silently, Sam wills him to say it. To really say it, own it, accept it, deal with it.

Barnes could stand up and walk away, or roar up and snap Sam's head off, or tell Sam to go fuck himself. Instead, he says her name, equal to a mouthful of red-hot nails. "Natasha. I killed Natasha."

Some of them had suspected that, given the blood on Barnes and the body Tony had pulled from that building. Others hadn't known what the hell to think. It should have been pretty fucking obvious, when Barnes wouldn't talk to  _anyone_ for three days, except to ask, "Can I have a window?"

If anyone had suspected the rest of it, they hadn't said anything.

"Does Naceri know?"

"No."

"Okay." Sam rubs circles on Barnes' back, their bodies leaning into each other – shoulder against shoulder, knee against knee – and leaves it at that for now. "Thanks for telling me."

The calm, cool early autumn water laps at the bank. A black snake monitors them from a shallow depth, its red tongue flicking. A green bull frog surfaces near a cluster of drooping cattails and browning lily pads, no longer offended by their presence.

Life moves forward, all of its beauty collateral damage.

***

After a long day of a flurry of uneventful missions between three teams, Steve shoulders into Bucky's apartment to the inviting scent of cooking chicken, greens, and potatoes. It's another Monday evening, and this—Bucky making dinner—is almost becoming a ritual, like old times.

Steve sneaks a peek into the kitchen. An open book in his lap, Bucky sits on top of the island, across from the bustling stove. He looks Steve's way. "Hey."

"How long?"

"About ten minutes."

That's good time to read emails, send some messages, and make sure Natasha and Sharon make their check-in time. Steve does all of that in the living room, until a plate of food drops down on the table in front of him.

Lucky for him, Bucky's a stress cooker. The plate is piled with stuffed chicken breasts, white-sauce pasta, mashed potatoes, asparagus, Brussel sprouts. More than that: it's something Bucky's mom used to make on the regular.

On the floor, his plate on top of the coffee table, Bucky turns on the TV and asks, "How was today?"

Bucky's been living vicariously through everyone's AARs, or so say the access records; none have been particularly exciting.

Straight-faced, Steve reports, "We raided three HYDRA bases, stopped nine nuclear attacks, and discovered another alternate world."

That tugs out a real smile. "That just sounds exhausting."

"We're treading water out there. Waiting for a catastrophe." Steve hesitates. "How was your day?"

It was a big day today.

Bucky's fork twists aimlessly around a wad of noodles.

Not good then.

Steve bites his tongue and keeps eating, already planning around Bucky being permanently off-schedule. As it is, Natasha's already down to one official day off a week, doubling up on missions with Sharon.

For now, that's not a problem; in the long-term, it's not sustainable. Tony and Rhodes may be able to rotate in. Other than that, Maria needs to work on deepening their pool of superheroes.

Bucky's fork keeps twirling, building a too-big roll of pasta while his eyes stare vacantly at the plate. Other than a few bites, he hasn't eaten.

 _Was it that bad?_  Steve has dared not ask for two months. He doesn't want to know, but it has to have been.

Steve's hungry and keeps eating, as Bucky picks at his food, lost somewhere in his head.

"What's keeping you here?" Steve wonders, dread like lead in his gut. The answer could be  _nothing_.

Attention on his plate, Bucky lifts his right shoulder and furrows his eyebrows. "Stay until it's easy, right. It's gonna be a while."

Steve's lips turn upward, before he catches on that Bucky's not kidding.

"I really don't—" Bucky starts to say, but the  _chirp!_ of his smartwatch interrupts him.

The notification tone is specific for Maria. With a turn of his wrist, Bucky glances at the screen, then stands up.

"Gotta go. I'll clean up when I get back."

Concerned without showing, Steve takes another bite. "I'll take care of it."

"'Kay. Thanks."

Steve watches him leave, dread turning to worry that tangles into a knot.

***

Barnes takes the stairs down to Three, failing to stop himself from thinking about the odd time of the request for a meeting.

He's gone to every counseling session with Naceri – hasn't even been  _late_. He gave her what she wanted today.

He's submitted every Canary Report, including making up for the one he'd missed while at the Cosmodrome in July. He'd sent her  _two_  that week. Since then, he's even ignored the urge to turn them into full-on rants about HYDRA. He'd kept each and every report substantial, actionable, usable, professional.

He made up for all the missed Combat classes – but the trainees aren't happy with him, so that could be it, though he'll laugh if it is, because all they can say is "he's mean and leaves on time." They have no idea how easy they have it.

It has to be the decision to permanently ground him or reactivate him. Given the context, he can guess: he's done. And then he's gone, not as easy to roll as Steve.

The blinds of the conference room fully cover the newly replaced windows. Tempted to save Hill the time and  _leave_ —only putting off that idea because Steve's in his apartment—Barnes pulls open the unlocked door and doesn't go much further past it, not when he sees Hill, Naceri, and Sam.

Sam.

Immediately, without giving himself time to think, Barnes pins Sam with a devastating, disbelieving glare. "You  _told_?"

"B—" Sam can't figure out what else to say, evidently. "I had to."

"You  _fucking_ —"

"Barnes, sit down," Maria interrupts, not harsh, not angry. If anything, her tone and body language tell him this is some sort of faux-helpful intervention about how to work together through the worst three days of his life since—well, sometime in 2016.

Sam  _told them_.

Irate, he does something he could never do with HYDRA: he walks out.

He walks to the end of the hallway and down three open flights of cold, newly replaced granite stairs. He walks to the newly renovated foyer entrance, in full view of every camera, and walks into the warm night air.

He walks down the concrete pathway and veers off before reaching the parking lot. He walks through spaghetti-like grass, this time expertly avoiding perimeter cameras and alarms.

He walks down the gradual slope that leads to the forest, avoiding more alarms, and then walks the overgrown footpath that winds through green-capped trees and crunching, dead leaves.

He walks until his hand shakes too much to ignore, and until his chest feels like a bowl of soggy Rice Krispies drowning in milk, and until his brain demands that he stops to think the fuck through what'd just happened, and that's when he stops walking.

He finds the nearest tree, plants his back flat against the trunk, and slides down until his ass hits the forest bed. Barnes tilts his head back and stares up at the sky. Orion is shining up there, shield and all.  _I see it_.

It reminds him of flaking gray paint on a prison wall in Krausberg.

His chest tightens, and he stops looking at the stars; instead, he draws up his knees, wraps his arms around them, and presses the palm of both of his hands into his wet eyes. His right hand shakes and shakes.

Krausberg and the Misad-fucking-ventures of Bucky-Out-of-His-Depth-Barnes are the last things he needs to be thinking about. Those disgusting, infinite days and nights are  _gone_. They're absolutely gone, except –

July.

 _Sam told_.

He closes his eyes and sees Natasha's dead stare, smells her blood, feels her bones crunching under his strength. How he could kill her but had to have Dugan kill the fucking guard, he doesn't know.

How he could kill Tony's parents and live in his building, eat his food, sleep in his bed, train his employees, and take his money.

How he could shoot Natasha, millimeters from her heart. Slash her femoral.

How he could kick Sam from the blacktop of a helicarrier, every intention to kill him.

How he could lay on a rooftop, armed with a high-powered rifle, eyes scanning for Steve, trigger finger patiently waiting. Stab him, shoot him, pound his face with every bit of power capable of his arm.

Those thoughts sawing at his mind, there isn't a choice between going back to base or running further away.

He gets up and tears the rest of the way to the pond. Down the steep, grassy hill, he sits down in front of the water line, where he and Sam had sat just hours ago. The gentle lapping of the water and the absolute darkness of the night with all of its nocturnal sounds wrap around him, more comforting than anything has a right to be.

Crickets and cicadas murmur, an infinite drone.

The lights of fireflies blink all around him.

A mosquito hums in his ear.

His chest aches.

After July, being here is like going back in time to the winter of 2015, when he couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't breathe, couldn't live, and, even with the barrel of trembling SIG Sauer pressed against his forehead, couldn't die.

Steve wonders why he stays, and the truth of it is that he doesn't have a good enough reason – not even the fear of leaving is good enough.

He lets the hours crawl past him, the warm autumn night sink around him, the dark slip through him, while he wraps himself in his thoughts and chases a decision.

***

His gray wool jacket and a pack of his cigarettes drop onto the frozen ground. Steve  _thumps_ down next to them.

"You blew off your early class this morning. Maria's worried you're not coming back."

Heat races into Barnes' cheeks and his heart skips, then kicks off for a brisk sprint. He'd forgotten about that class. He'd  _forgotten_. That fucking does not –

"She's not mad. Just worried. We're all a little worried."

"Why?"

Barnes fears the answer. Sam told Maria and Naceri, but that doesn't automatically mean everyone else knows, unless it does, and, if it does, he'll go to ground so fucking fast that they'll never have the slightest fucking chance of finding him.

"Because you walked out of a meeting, snuck off the base, spent the night outside, and blew off a class. Not a whole lot of that is like you."

That's a good answer, the one he'd needed to hear. "I can't always be—"  _What you all need. What I was_.

"No, that's fine." Steve sounds like he means it. "They call those 'sick days' now. You just tell somebody."

"Okay."

Barnes means to end the conversation. It's not often that easy with Steve.

"We're not HYDRA, Buck."

Incredulous, Barnes turns a stare onto Steve and snaps, "That's good, because I wasn't going to fucking say you were."

Those kinds of reactions might have become an irreparable part of him. He  _loathes_  it.

Steve takes it in stride, quiet, palpably patient, and smiling. "I make assumptions."

The only thing Barnes has to say to that is "yeah, you do," and so he doesn't say anything. He stares out over the fog-misting pond and wonders if Steve thinks he's going back to the base soon.

He's not.

Steve pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket, unlocks with it a thumbprint, and immediately starts tapping away at a text message. Barnes doesn't try to read it, not sure he cares about what Steve's writing, but Steve tilts the phone Barnes' way. The text is to Natasha—a person Barnes hasn't talked to  _in weeks_ —and it says "found him; be back later."

Barnes shrugs, uncontrollably obstinate. He'd been doing much, much better on his own, away from all of this, and he's unraveling here, a day at a time.

"What if I'd really left last night? Would they've let me go?"

Steve hits "send" and grabs, of all things, the pack of cigarettes. He pulls out one and the cheap Bic lighter inside, then tosses the pack at Barnes. It hits his leg. Barnes watches him, waiting for an answer.

"You say you don't think we're HYDRA, but then you ask questions like that. You can't have it both ways."

Steve lights up somewhere in the middle of that tirade. Barnes closes his eyes and breathes in the delicious smell of the smoke, then grabs the pack of cigarettes. The lighter hits his arm and falls into his lap.

"I didn't know you smoked."

"Never used to," Steve replies, his tone clearly conveying  _it's because of you_.

This whole thing—the HYDRA-SHIELD thing, not the cigarette thing—is a non-issue. But Steve hit on something so incredibly naïve, that –

"We've—they've—worked hard to ensure that SHIELD isn't a shade of HYDRA. This iteration of it is the first time I could say that." Steve turns his head to look at him. Barnes doesn't reciprocate; he blows out a cloud of smoke and watches it blend with the white mist of the pond. "You damn well know that."

Barnes exhales another breath of smoke and flops backwards onto the hard, cold ground. The thousands of early morning stars are clear, with the grays and browns of the Milky Way splintering across them. On habit, he picks out Orion again, connecting the dots with his eyes.

Months ago in Brazil, he'd promised himself that he wouldn't lie to Steve so much. Wouldn't assume that Steve needs that kind of protection. Wouldn't paint them both by their old numbers. It's easier said than done, so he goes ahead and says  _something_.

"That's not what happened last night."

Still sitting, Steve hesitates. Barnes can tell he bit back words, by the wasted breath that soaks into the air and swirls with the smoke.

"What happened?"

"Life," Barnes says.

Instantly, Steve comes down to the ground: back flat, right arm damn near on top of Barnes' left. "Are you okay?" he asks with ridiculous, emphatic urgency.

Barnes slowly, so slowly, exhales a cloud of cancerous, terrible, delightful smoke. "It's just – It's a lot."

Steve sighs and rolls back over. "You gonna leave?"

"No," he lies, without being quite sure why he waited long enough for someone to find him.  _Stay until it's easy_ rattles like a bell, as if some part of him wants to know what reaching the end of this game feels like.

"Okay," Steve says, as if that's enough to settle the whole matter. "Then come home."

"I'm fine out here."

The only thing that settles is a tense, odd silence between them. It used to be that they could talk for hours about anything, nothing, and everything. It used to be that there were no secrets between them. It used to be.

Barnes smokes the cigarette down to a short stub and buries it in his left fist. Steve's still smoking his.

"One bad thing," Steve says, minutes and minutes later. "You first?"

Barnes closes his eyes. Breathes the cold morning air, feels it coat his lungs, and thinks of simpler, clearer times.

He could tell Steve to shut up, like Bucky might have. He could say, "I'm not feeling this" and shut Steve down. He could push himself through this mess and embrace that this—all of this—might still be something worth holding onto.

Minutes ago, Steve called it "home," and Barnes hadn't thought to correct him. He could hold onto this.

"Sometimes, I wonder what it was like for Becca and John. The first Thanksgiving. The first Christmas. And then for Becca and my mom after 1950." What he means to say more than anything: "I miss Becca so fucking much."

Steve sits up, taking with him the warmth of his body. Barnes misses that, too.

"I let you go. And I—"

Steve tilts his head, a jerk, a twitch of his jaw, and doesn't finish his sentence, because Steve doesn't bleed like that. Barnes can bleed out for him:  _And I let them have you. I didn't suffer the same way. I failed you_. All of it is fucking bullshit.

"There's nothing you could have done."

"And I didn't look," Steve finishes, sounding outraged at himself. He lights up another cigarette. "Something good."

A little harder.  _Fuck it._ "Being alone out here."

He keeps his eyes closed, pretending he can't feel Steve's eyes crawling all over him.

"I love  _this_ ," Steve replies, apparently his good thing. "Something you hate."

 _Fuck it_ , again. He points toward the sky. "Constellations. Sorry."

"Since when?" Steve asks, funeral soft.

"It got caught up in some bad stuff." A twinge of anger pulls a string, and that string opens his mouth. "Probably somewhere in that file."

"Sorry I asked."

Not always easy, this friendship. Never had been. It's just – before, way before, Bucky had been so much better at smoothing the waves. The person he is now could—sometimes would—argue that a calm sea goes nowhere fast.

"Bread," Steve adds. "I really hate bread."

Oh, god,  _yes_. Barnes rolls onto his side, eyes wide open. "It tastes like  _cake_."

"And they don't get it!" Steve exclaims. "Not a damned one of them."

What Barnes misses is his mom's bread. Misses being young, coming home, and smelling the fresh, warm loaf the second he opened the door. He misses John and Andrew fighting. Misses Becca's calm, sarcastic presence – and Sharon almost, almost, almost fills that hole.

Barnes sits up, shoulder to shoulder with his friend. "Something hard."

"The ground. Also, my ass is a damned ice block, and we're missing breakfast.  _Breakfast_."

"Seriously."

Steve sighs and pulls his knees up to his elbows. Barnes looks at Steve's silhouetted profile in the early morning moonlight, and, for the first time since 1943, he  _sees_  Steve. He sees his long, bumpy nose and near-pointy chin, the ever-present, pulled-together wrinkle of his eyebrows, the way the modern cut of his hair changes the contour of his face, and the completely misplaced cigarette between his lips.

"The world. It's not home. Not mine." Steve chuffs out a laugh. "No one knows that. Not even Sam."

After everything, despite it all, maybe even because of it all, he loves this world.

"No, drop me off in a city, and I'm great. Put me in that building, with all of those people?" Barnes shakes his head. "Natasha told me to stay until it's easy. I think she's crazy."

"'Those people,'" Steve comments. "You usually act like you like them."

"I do like them."

Steve's smart and getting better at being bright about it. "You deserve them."

Almost never feels that way. The better they are, the hotter his body burns, the tighter his chest squeezes, because he god damn  _doesn't_.

The idea of going back there and playing pretend is overwhelming, daunting, humiliating.

His go-bag is two klicks from here. It'll get him to a municipal airport in Canada, then to Whitehorse, and then to Russia. He'll never look back, fuck it all.

He looks to Steve and doubts that he can let him go again. He thinks of Natasha—his Natasha, with the scar millimeters from her heart—and doesn't know that he can leave her. He thinks of Sam, as close a friend—not a brother, not a partner—as he's had in decades, and, as pissed as he is at him, doesn't know that he can let him down again.

If he goes, there's no path back.

If he stays, he doesn't know the path forward.

 _Beep_ - _beep!_

Steve's phone.

Instead of looking at it, Steve  _whaps_  Barnes' arm. "Put on your jacket."

Irritation flutters through him. "No."

"Trust me."

Still irritated, Barnes pulls on his jacket. Admittedly, it's his favorite, and he might be glad Steve brought it. Nevertheless, Barnes ignores Steve's hand and gets to his feet without the offered help.

For a moment, Steve stands and stares, exasperated in the still-dim rays of sunrise. "You really have to be that way?"

Barnes nods. "Yep."

Without another comment, Steve begins to walk easterly, the opposite way of base. Barnes visualizes the map of the area - east leads to a forested stream, then, after six and a half klicks of that, Highway Eight. Not really that much.

"Where're you going?"

"You'll see."

They walk to Highway Eight in quiet companionship. A plain black sedan sits parked alongside the road, with its orange hazard lights flashing.

Barnes stops before the forest sinks into a ditch full of beige, crinkly grass. He's seen all he needs to see. "Okay. Good job. I'm going back to base."

Or to his bag, to the airport, away.

"Get in the car, Buck."

The passenger side window slides down. Sam leans over from the driver's seat, peers out the window, and provides an easy "good morning."

Irrational anger douses him in gasoline, lit matches raining from the sky.

Barnes turns a genuine, mean stare onto Steve. "What is this?"

Steve's eyebrows damn near reach his hairline. His lips press together until his mouth forms a shallow dome. "Breakfast. Off-base. What'd you think?"

He doesn't have an answer for that, and, so, he relents by getting in the car.

"You look like you could rip apart the world today," Sam comments, like last night hadn't happened. "Everything okay?"

"Go fuck yourself," Barnes snaps, then lies flat on his back across the backseat, an arm thrown over his eyes. His jacket sleeve carries a pleasant hint of his own shampoo; he inhales it with deep, calming breaths.

"Nice to see you, too."

The tires drive smoothly across the fresh-asphalt road. Specks of that asphalt fill the car's interior with a bitter scent and pitter-patter against the car's body. The engine is quiet. Someone sifts through fuzzy FM radio stations.

Steve and Sam fill the time with idle chatter, while Barnes realizes how bone-deep  _tired_  he is. It's not a sudden crash of energy but a reckoning that he's felt this unrelenting exhaustion for a long time.

"He slept through most of Europe, you know," he hears Sam remark.

Steve replies, "Huh."

"Look at that." Sam. "I swear to God he's a five-year-old."

He does care about  _that_. "Fuck you."

"A mouthy five-year-old," Steve adds.

Whatever.

Any other day, it would've been in one ear and straight out the other. Right now, even in the safety of this car and with two friends inside of it, he's on a razor's edge. He doesn't want to be here.

An arm still over his eyes, he pretends to doze and thinks of his path to be anywhere but here and anywhere but there.

***

Sam pulls the car into a gravel parking lot of a roadside diner. At least fifteen vehicles are already packed into the spaces. Even out here inside the car, Steve smells old layers of grease and starts to doubt the reviews Sam said "are amazing – seriously, trust me, amazing."

Steve's sneakers crunch and twist into the gravel. For a moment, he wonders if they haven't accidentally wandered into the alternate world. The wood shingle siding of the building needs a fresh coat of red paint to replace the fading, cracked peels; the restaurant's sign is missing letters; and the tattered, crinkly-plastic white banner announcing "open for breakfast" flaps in the wind.

"I know it doesn't look like much, but it's good," Sam promises, although nervously. "I've come here a few times."

The rear passenger car door slams.

"I'm not fucking doing this," Bucky sharply says. "I'll walk back."

Bucky sticks his hands in his jacket pockets and starts across the parking lot, toward the road, in the exact opposite direction of headquarters. Unless Bucky has suddenly, in the last ten seconds, forgotten his impeccable sense of direction, that's intentional.

_Damn it._

Sam starts toward Bucky, but Steve holds out his arm and shakes his head. "Go get a table. I'll get him."

"You sure?"

Honestly? "No. But I've got this."

He easily catches up with a half-assed trot. A few feet away, he opens with the first and only salvo he's got. "Don't leave!"

The way it catches Bucky off guard confirms Steve's suspicion: Bucky doesn't plan on coming back. Steve's stomach flips ass-over-end. That can't happen. It can't.

"What happen—"

Bucky spins around but doesn't move an inch closer. "Why didn't you go to London?"

It's abrupt, out of nowhere, but Steve knows exactly what Bucky's talking about. The math is simple, and, although it should chill to Steve to his core, it really doesn't. "Is that how it was gonna be?"

"Yeah," Bucky snaps, callous bubbling into an angry, painful blister. "That's how it was gonna fucking be. But, great, we're  _friends_. Everything's fucking  _great_. I make breakfast for your fucking girlfriend, play teacher with the fucking kids, and love a person I fucking killed."

Stunned, Steve stands helpless as Bucky spins back around and keeps walking up the shoulder of the road.

"Did Sharon say that?"

Bucky throws up a middle finger.

He'd hoped it would at least make him stop. It usually would. Bucky is nearly over a crest in the road, when Steve thinks through panic and comes up with an answer to the original question.

"It was because of you."

Bucky lurches to a stop. His head tilts to the side, allowing Steve at least one receptive ear.

"The day of my flight, the art school sent a letter, asking what I wanted to do with your money. I took a train to Brooklyn and spent the night on the docks at Sheepshead Bay."

Bucky's shoulders rise, and, even twenty feet away, Steve can hear his forceful intake of breath. Any other day, Bucky would be calling him an idiot and asking why the hell he'd sleep there. On that any other day, Steve would reply that he hadn't slept: he'd walked and stared and mulled and ached, hollow and listless.

"Life without you—" Steve won't finish the thought out loud; the only reachable conclusion is unspeakable but one he's lived, over and over again. "Leave on a good day. You'll regret doing it on a bad one."

That's advice straight from Bucky's own mouth, aged a few lifetimes.

"God damn it," Bucky breathes, the words carrying to Steve on the favor of a light breeze.

Finally, he turns around, expression crafted from resentful stone, and briskly walks toward Steve and then straight past Steve, not a word between them.

A car rips by, going at least fifteen over the limit, its driver staring at a phone. After it passes, Steve runs up to Bucky, meeting up at his shoulder.

"You don't have to do this alone."

Bucky jerks his head to the side, jaw clenched.

"Unless you want to?" Steve wonders – all the while thinking that's not the person he knows. Bucky leaned on people – on Steve, on Becca, on Anna, on Dugan, on friends Steve had barely ever known.

"I was  _fine_ this morning, until you came," Bucky snaps. "I don't need this and I sure as hell don't want it."

Incredulous, Steve blurts "you are nowhere  _near_ fine and you fucking know it" and reacts without thinking: he stops and grabs Bucky's right arm to make him stop walking, too. It's a testament to how high-strung and  _not fucking fine_ Bucky is that Bucky twists around, breaks the grab, and slams his left hand into Steve's chest.

Steve lets Bucky aggressively walk them both off the shoulder, across the ditch and through a straggly tree line, until Steve's back  _thumps_  against the thick trunk of an old maple. The wood audibly splinters. Brown leaves fall.

Air knocked clear and clean out of him, Steve coughs and sucks in a couple quick gulps of air. He's not hurt, shaken, or rattled – only out of breath.

Bucky's left hand drops, as thinly veiled surprise and revulsion spreads across his face. Bucky steps back, right hand cupped over his mouth and nose, then drops onto a mushy, decomposing log.

"You're 'fine'?" Steve questions. "You stand by that?"

It's unnecessary.

Bucky's hand stays over his mouth, his eyes distant and staring. Besides that, in the grand scheme of things, after everything in Death Valley and everything that came after, Steve owes him a few more tree-slams.

Steve sits next to Bucky and rests a hand on his leg. "You all right?"

As he scrubs his hand over his face, Bucky quietly replies, "I told myself I'd never do that to you again."

Yeah, if Steve thinks hard enough, he can take himself straight back to April 2014, with Bucky holding him flat against a car with one hand, a poised knife in the other. Every second, every move, had presented a close brush with a quick, gruesome death.  _Not the same person_ , Steve thinks – and believes.

Steve doesn't know what to say: it's not okay, but it's also not a big deal. So, he ignores it and wonders about something a little more interesting. "The London Olympics? Really?"

"Opening Ceremony," Bucky replies, flat and unemotional. "'Make it messy.'"

At first, all Steve can think is that it would've been a horribly public way to go, before he really thinks it through and knows, perhaps naively, that it never would have happened.

"You wouldn't've done it."

Still flat, Bucky answers, "I would have. I'm glad you didn't go."

Steve's not: it sounds like a missed, potential chance to have gotten Bucky out of there two years earlier without the mess of Insight—and all the wasted years after.

"The person who pulled me out of a river disagrees with you," Steve argues. Just to ice that cake, he says, "I killed you. You never got that far."

Fire in his eyes, Bucky sticks an acidic glare onto Steve. "You think that make—"

_Crack-crack-craaaaack._

Together, they look toward the maple, in time to see it slowly, ever so slowly, topple to the ground, bringing with it long branches, a wave of leaves, and all the surrounding saplings.

Steve laughs, though he's not sure if it's because of the tree or Bucky's horrified reaction to it. "C'mon. Let's go eat."

***

In a far back corner of the diner, Sam and Steve bicker and chat about anything. Barnes picks at the plastic corner of his greasy, fingerprint-smudged menu, their voices little more than white noise.

He doesn't want to be here.

He doesn't want to be anywhere else, either.

The server comes and takes their orders, an eyebrow raising higher and higher as he and Steve threaten to destroy their kitchen with the size of their orders. Sam hides a grin with a fist.

He lets them keep talking, while he stays silent and misses having the menu as a distraction. He doesn't even have his phone to stare at. He chooses to look out the window at the gravel parking lot and watch as vehicles zoom down the highway.

"…right, B?"

A lime green hamster car—like the one from the dumb commercial he hates—pulls into the lot. Barnes watches it with feigned rapt attention. "I'm not talking to you."

Steve hisses out a stressful sounding breath. Out of the very far corner of his eye, Barnes sees him mouth "leave him alone" at Sam. Good advice.

"How's the playoffs looking?" Steve asks, pure and total bait to lure Sam far, far away from whatever discussion he wants to have.

"Not great. The Panthers—"

Barnes tunes them out again.

He moves his eyes from the window to the ripped cushions of empty booths, then along the old wood paneling painted with a thin layer of grease, to gray cobwebs sagging in the corners, and, finally, to the tufts of dust barely hanging onto the blades of the three ceiling fans. He's eaten in worse places, in far filthier conditions – and he doesn't want to fucking eat  _here_.

The food comes in rapid waves, plates filling up the table fast. Steve and Sam storm the food like it's a god damn forward offensive.

Barnes tries a piece of toast; it's crisp but over-buttered and about two minutes from tasting stale. He puts it onto the side of a plate and pokes at the bulbous, jiggly yolk of a fried egg.

Under his breath, Sam whispers, "Fucking food diva."

Mockingly, under his own breath, Barnes whispers back, "Fuck you."

Captain America says, "Knock it off, both of you."

Sam snorts and, with a trove of good humor, replies, "Whatever you say, Dad."

Barnes remembers too much of Steve before Captain America to buy the act. He zeroes in on Steve's face, where, aside from a thickening five o'clock shadow changing the contours of his face, a pair of thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses serve as a disguise under his NY Giants ballcap.

Barnes remarks, "You look so fucking stupid."

It deflates Steve so efficiently, evidenced by a quiet sigh, a shallow frown, an acquiescent tilt of his head, and a weakly argued, "It works, okay?"

He's good at undercutting Steve, and, in this moment, Barnes wishes he could rewind the clock and take it back. Can't do that.

So, Barnes eats and ignores them again. This time, neither of them exchange more than a few half-hearted, mini-conversations, making for an awkwardly quiet breakfast.

The food isn't as amazing as Sam made it sound, but it's not as shitty as Barnes expected from the way this whole place oozes grease.

Steve finishes every single bite down to every itty-bitty crumb, then leans back, cracks his back against the split seat cushion, and sighs with fulfilled relief.

It wasn't  _that_ good.

Almost as soon as he's fully relaxed, Steve sits up straight, announces "I'll be back," and slides out of the booth.

Barnes follows Steve with his eyes, until Steve rounds the corner, out of sight. He hides behind his white coffee cup. The coffee is cold and gross, but he drinks it and hopes Sam vanishes into thin air.

Sam doesn't. "He's not doing as good as he seems. How about you?"

Barnes shrugs and shifts in his seat, eyes once again focused on the window. In the parking lot, he can match all eleven vehicles parked there to the nineteen people in here, and then rattle off their license plate numbers, makes, and models without looking. He wishes he could turn that off.

"Are you going to run to Maria and tell her what I say?" Barnes asks, tone intentionally hard and unforgiving. "Is that how this works now?"

Sam laughs and shakes his head in frustration. "You really expected me to sit on that? For real?"

"Yeah," Barnes hisses, in lieu of making a public scene that will have Steve's super duper cereal box prize disguise look even fucking stupider. "I told you as a friend."

"And I told  _Shirin_ —not Maria— _as a friend_. I'm not gonna watch you self-destruct. You're getting the help you need, and you're not going back out there until you're ready."

Barnes allows Sam an ugly, vindictive smirk. "Don't fucking talk to me."

Sam hides his hurt with an acerbic eyeroll. "Not a good look, man."

A server comes to refill the cups. Barnes thanks him with a tight, quick smile, then stares past Sam out the window again. In his peripheral, he watches Sam dump three packets of sugar and two creams into his refilled coffee. He takes his time stirring, not saying a word.

This is where they are now. It's not okay, and it's not what he wants, but – it hardly matters. Maybe he doesn't take off today; maybe he waits until tomorrow, or next week, or some random day.

Sam leans back, steaming cup teetering in his hands. "What'd you used to do for them?"

The answer is too ridiculously obvious for him to say it, and so he doesn't.

"Missions and training, right?" Sam says, unfailingly undeterred. Not exactly how Barnes would've described it. "Same things you do for us. It's why we're here.  _Neither of you_  have left the base in months. You liked living on your own. You liked Berlin. You liked the alternate world. So. Get out there. Take a day off. Ever heard of a long weekend?  _No_."

Barnes opens his mouth to contest that – but he quickly realizes it's true.

Steve slides back into the booth. "What's going on?"

Sam sips his coffee and intentionally lets Barnes hang. That's too bad, because Barnes still has no idea what's going on with this.

"I don't know. What are we doing?" Barnes asks.

Steve pulls out his phone, taps at an app, and reads. "Central Park. New York Public Library. Prospect Park – fishing gear in the trunk. Yankees play the Mariners at 1900. Freshkills Park is open—"

"Staten Island? Really?" Barnes gripes, to the rolling of Sam's eyes.

Steve keeps reading whatever list he's made up, ending with, "And we could always walk the Brooklyn Bridge and see where we end up. Any of that sound good?"

It all sounds like a lot of babysitting. "No."

Under the table, Sam kicks his shin,  _hard_. Although Barnes glares at Sam just as  _hard_ , he catches on: this isn't for him. It's for Steve.

He doesn't know that he has this in him today, or ever. For Steve, if only to make up for earlier, he'll find whatever he needs to make it happen. "What's the weather like?"

Though guarded, Steve perks up. "Sunny and 75 by noon."

"Sounds like a good day for the bridge," Barnes offers, much to the apparent relief of Sam. "There's a place to eat called the Shake Shack near the park. Might be good for lunch."

"Yeah?"

After Barnes nods, Steve grabs the bill from the edge of the table and takes it up to the line at the register. To those unfamiliar with him, he must seem reserved and controlled, as serious as ever; Barnes sees the uncertain excitement in how he walks, how he holds his face, how he gets the hell away from them to burn off bounding energy.

He also sees flat-out terror and a kid who never trusted the staying power of good things. Who could blame him: the good things always found a way to never last.

That thought douses him in ice. He loses his breath.  _Stay until it's easy_  finally makes sense:  _stay when it's hard_.

Sam's eyes turn from amused on Steve to heated on Barnes. "You have no idea what you being here does for him. Light yourself on fire all fucking day long – people are used to it, right? You have us all trained real damn well. But you go down, he goes down. Remember that."

With that little diatribe over, Sam gets up and walks out to the parking lot, hands jammed deep into his pockets for warmth.

Steve smooths a couple of bills out on the table and slides a glass on top of them. All that excitement has been eaten alive by all that skeptical doubt. "You sure about this? We can go back."

Outside, Sam slams the driver's side car door closed and starts the engine, exhaust billowing in the chilly morning air.

"Buck? C'mon, we'll go back. We've seen the br—"

Whatever Steve's saying doesn't matter. "This is a good thing we have."

Despite Sam being outside, the bill being paid, and the morning ticking away, Steve slides into the booth with the most earnest face Barnes has ever seen. "Yeah. It is."

"Thanks for stopping me."

Although it catches him off guard, Steve takes it in stride. "I'm getting pretty good at that."

What a delusional asshole.

***

Sunny with a cool 68 Fahrenheit reposed within the washed-out blue tint of the sky, a crisp wind shrieks through the gridwire safety guard and wobbles the thick suspension cables. Far, far out on the horizon, past the bay, the sky is tinged red and framed by a thick glob of dark gray clouds. So much for the forecast.

Even with that storm brewing on the horizon, it's not a bad morning for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. About a hundred other people agree.

Good thing he, Steve, and Sam are wearing top-of-the-line disguises: hats, sunglasses or fake glasses, and even scarves borrowed from Stark's old place.

Out here in the open, Barnes finally notices that Steve's choice of casual, almost-baggy clothes gives the illusion of his upper body being at least two sizes smaller. It's actually…not bad, coupled with everything else. Even Barnes probably wouldn't recognize Steve at a quick glance, and, realistically, a poorly disguised Steve is the one people would be most likely recognize.

The three of them walk side-by-side, with Steve the mediator in the middle. Barnes watches the people around them—more locals than tourists—and falls into a habit of assessing each of them for threats. At the same time, he continually creates escape plans in case of an attack.

"It's nice to get out," Steve comments to fill the silence.

"First time in a long time," Sam agrees.

Right now, this second, the other Steve could flash onto the walkway. Despite everything, Barnes would grab Sam first, hop up the twenty feet of safety wires and suspension cords, and swing them both over the side. He'd time it so that he'd fall onto the container of one of the many commercial trucks below (not a car, never a car), Sam safely on top of him. And then –

Sam's suddenly on his right. Once he has Barnes' attention, Sam lifts his left wrist and taps near an unobtrusive silver bracelet. "See that? My wingpack. We're fine."

Yeah. He's seen it.

Barnes challenges Sam. "Oh? Which one of us would you carry?"

Sam  _should_  choose Steve.

"How much do you weigh?" Sam asks but doesn't wait for Barnes to not answer. "Probably 190 now? Steve?"

 _Now._  What does  _now_ mean.

"More than that," Steve replies.

Sam nods, gearing up for a big reveal that Barnes can guess hours ahead of time: Tony made a set of wings rated to carry more than the old ones. Super.

"Doesn't matter," Sam says. "They can support 800 pounds."

"Great. Get away from me."

Sam sucks in a breath, tenses his shoulders, nods in defeat, and goes back to Steve's side. Steve pats Sam's back but doesn't intervene. Barnes would never want him to – or do something so stupid as pick sides.

Near the midpoint of the bridge, they pass a string of food carts—hot dogs, shakes, pretzels, the usual. Steve only makes it a minute and a half past the carts before his stomach audibly rumbles. Ahead, all the way to the end of the bridge, there's nothing else until Brooklyn.

"Dude," Sam says, "just go get something. We'll wait."

As he turns to do that, Steve asks, "You guys want something?"

Neither of them do.

As close as side-by-side but as distant as the two ends of this bridge, Barnes and Sam stand together at the side of the walkway. Below them, cars, trucks, and semis rumble down asphalt. River birds swoop through the suspension cables and expertly perch atop the tawny wires. The quick, short steps of energetic kids patter behind them, followed by a collection of chatter in English, Spanish, German, French, and Hindi.

In his time here, Italian was a big one. German wasn't spoken so loudly. Otherwise, this could be his City, every bit of it.

"B. I don't want this to be us. We're friends."

Agreed.

"What did you tell them?"

Sam checks to see where Steve ended up—out of earshot. "I told Shirin. She went to Maria. I don't think Maria knows."

Sharply, Barnes pounces on the non-fucking-answer. "That's not what I god damn asked. What did you tell her?"

"What you told me." Sam's voice drops real low. "That she raped you. That you killed her."

 _That's_ not the word he would  _ever_ use for that, not compared to – to Krausberg. Sam had no fucking  _right._

Quiet, cold rage skitters through him, and for a moment, just a little moment, the idea of kicking Sam through the guard wires, across the highway below, and down into the swishing river water below sounds real,  _real_ good.

"You should start walking away." Barnes' voice shakes enough to be noticeable. "It'd be a shame if you fell."

Sam pivots and faces Barnes squarely, chest puffed, defiance in his eyes. "Do it."

Just a little unhinged, Barnes grabs Sam's arm just a little, steps into Sam's space just a little, and gives Sam just a little push toward the guardrail, toward highway. Sam spazzes: breaks Barnes' grip, spins around, shouts "fucking  _Christ!_ " and takes several,  _several_ steps away.

People stare – and keep on walking.

Steve has wandered off into a line of people clamoring for hotdogs, nowhere in sight, and definitely not close enough to have seen or heard that.

Barnes yawns, eyes actually heavy, crosses his arms, and leans his elbows against the rusted steel guardrail. He looks out across the busy highway below, to the sun-sparkled, choppy water beyond, and watches toy people work atop toy boat decks.

A daydream crosses his mind of Sam falling into the water, Steve coming back, and Barnes denying all knowledge of ever knowing a Sam Wilson – "who the hell is Sam? Let's get decent food."

Sam cautiously wanders back. "You're an asshole. Why are you smiling?"

Barnes can't possibly answer that honestly, not without Sam starting to believe him.

At the end of the proverbial day, he'll forgive Sam, but he'll never forget. They're done. Natasha's done. He's still got Steve and kind of Sharon. He feels like one of Steve's Housewives, shuffling through friendships and alliances, and maybe now he can flip a table at someone or toss his detached left arm across the dinner table or –

"What if you don't deal with this, have a flashback, and hurt her? And what if that happened, and I knew the entire time but never said anything? So: I told your therapist. I didn't know she'd bring in Maria and do that yesterday."

Barnes wants a cigarette. He wants Sam to go away. He wants the month of June to come back; that'd been a good month, one of the better ones. He can't have any of that, not right now, and so he answers, "That's why I've been avoiding her."

He might have woken up in her bed, with sliced-up, fuzzy memories insisting that he was  _safe, home, here_ , but the nerve agent still gnawing at the underside of his skin, and his eyes staring at her and seeing the other one. He might have considered ways to kill her, to escape, and she might have realized that, her hand not moving toward the sidearm she kept secured to the back of her dresser so much as her entire body moving out of the bedroom, through the living room, and out somewhere into Headquarters, until Sharon, Sam, Naceri, and a Security team made him go to Medical for four days. They hadn't called it a psych hold, but it'd been one.

"You just admitted that you're afraid it could happen."

Barnes cracks out a bitter laugh. "If that's how you want to take it."

"Remember Astana?"

Kazakhstan, September 2016, the last mission before Natasha and Sam went back to the City, while he fell apart and bounced around Europe. "What about it?"

"Remember when I said that I didn't want to see you drown? And you told me not to watch?"

Barnes nods: yeah, he remembers.

"You can kick, you can scream, all you damn want. No one here's just gonna watch. And you can hate me all you want for it."

Steve pops up beside them, almost definitely having heard at least the last thirty seconds but pretending to have not, and holds out milkshakes for both of them. "They're good. Real chocolate."

He and Sam mutter "thanks" at near-equal levels of enthusiasm.

Sam points up at the dark set of clouds swirling in from the Atlantic. "How about we get off the bridge?"

Sam walks ahead of them by quite a distance, while Barnes and Steve follow, their mouths busy with straws, until Steve slurps his cup empty in under five minutes.

Barnes counts down the time until he wins more unwanted platitudes.

_Three._

_Two._

_One._

"Remember when my mom died?"

Barnes sighs, rolls his eyes, wants to throw his head back and scream. Clipped, he answers, "Yeah."

Steve gets in and gets out, as fast as he can. "Thing is, you don't have to – do it alone."

"Don't fucking quote me to me."

A guy walks past, his hands cupped around his little daughter's ears, glaring the entire way. Barnes wants to yell  _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck_ at him but also doesn't want to end up on the news or Facepage or Snapagram or whatever.

The first raindrop splashes against his cheek. Barnes hopes it all hits Sam first; if a rain cloud would follow him around for a bit, that'd be great.

Steve deposits his empty cup in a convenient trash can. "I didn't quote you. I quoted him."

Barnes' legs stop working. Annoyed tourists and residents step around him, passive aggressively sighing and clearing their throats as they go. The City's a lot nicer than he remembers.

Steve walks backwards, grinning like a man with a mouth full of shit. "1953 was it. You said. Remember?"

Steve leaves him with that and catches up with Sam. Barnes thinks to get out of the way of people and shoulders his way to the edge of the walkway. The rain picks up as umbrellas flip into a shifting pool of domes, though most people, like him, came unprepared.

"Is he coming?" Sam asks, voice barely carrying.

"He'll find us."

"He tried to throw me off the bridge."

"Really. You can swim, though, right?"

"It's a  _highway_."

They walk out of earshot.

Brooklyn's stout brown highrises, brownstones, and burgeoning skyline of towers beckon a part of him home. It's nothing like the quiet, motionless other world. People swarm. Voices carry. Horns honk. Cranes swing beams to build the skyline bigger and better.

Somewhere along the way these past few months, he's stopped thinking that Bucky died, that the Winter Soldier went away, and that he's the shitty remnant of two lives crashing together. It took Steve saying that for him to realize – and he knows it's because of  _them_.

The rain becomes a downpour, windy and cold. People start running, with purses, papers, jackets over their heads.

Barnes stands right where he is, tilts his head back, and screams at the dark gray sky.

No one looks.

***

Not too late that night, clothes still damp, hair a mess, Barnes raps on Naceri's open door. Surprised, she looks up.

"You have time?"

"All the time," she replies.

He goes in and closes the door.

***

At 0930 on a cool Sunday morning, with Steve and Natasha out on some cakewalk mission (to placate Steve, no one acknowledges), and Sam and Sharon doing who knows what, Barnes sets a cup of coffee on Naceri's desk.

"A bribe?"

Barnes sits, hands tucked into his jacket pockets. "If I say it is, what will it get me?"

"Sixty minutes."

"Oh, boy."

It's exactly what it gets him, not a minute less. Afterward, he spends two hours, not a minute less, in the gym, whaling on the holographic bag. His knuckles bruise.

Back in his room by 1230, he scarfs down a quick, light lunch from old leftovers in the fridge, drops onto the sofa, asks JARVIS to put on whatever from Hulu, flips open his tablet, and starts to knock out another Canary Report that might actually  _help_  –

_Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock !_

Barnes glares at the door and that the person who keeps  _knock, knock, knock, knocking_. He decides to ignore it, like usual; whoever it is will go away.

He's wrong. The person doesn't go away. The person keeps  _knock, knock, knocking_.

It's Sam. No one would else, not even Steve, would do that.

"Fuck," he breathes, getting it out of his system now.

Barnes walks to the door and opens it.

Immediately, Sam shoulders his way inside. A stack of three cardboard pizza boxes occupy his hands, while his socked feet confidently pad toward the sofa.

Barnes simply watches as Sam drops the boxes on the coffee table, snatches the TV remote, and folds into the sofa, feet propped on the table. Some dumb show on Hulu is quickly replaced by CBS Sports and the unmistakable NFL theme music.

With a capitulating sigh, Barnes shuts the door.

"Oh, your life is  _hard_ ," Sam says, voice laced with mocking whine. "Panthers are playing. Sit down. You can watch the Housewives later."

A slew of shitty, head-ripping comments rush through Barnes' head and attack his tongue, roaring to be said. He locks his jaw and stays by the door, waiting for something like calm to come find him.

Sam glances over, eyebrows up. "You gonna say anything?"

Barnes shakes his head "no."

"You gonna rip my head off if you do?"

Barnes nods his head "yes."

"Well," Sam replies, his attention back to the TV, "stuff your face with pizza and shut up, then. It's cheese—no pepperoni, like you said—from the City. Don't know who doesn't like pepperoni, but whatever, you do you."

The enticing smell brings with it an iota of that calm, carried by all the good, recent memories it triggers.

"The bottom crust is stuffed with ooey-gooey cheese. You know you want some."

That's all it takes to get his ass on the sofa and hands inside one of the boxes. He ignores Sam's self-satisfied smirk and pays some mind to the game – Carolina at Washington DC, still the first quarter, no points.

Behind them, Barnes hears footsteps that sound like Sharon. A cold can of Pepsi drops into his lap, a few moments before a six-pack of cheap American beer sets down on the coffee table.

Sam stacks a napkin with two slices of pizza and hands it off to Sharon, who sits in the adjoining chair next to them.

She greets them. "The Panthers suck this year."

"You really have to be that way?"

"I can't help that your team sucks ass."

Content with his food, more and more at ease with the two of them here, Barnes offers, "Patriots."

"You fucking would," one of them retorts.

***

In the gap between the end of the afternoon game and Sunday Night Football, Sam having made it clear that they're watching all the way through, Barnes takes an intentionally long, meandering route to the Cafeteria – and regrets it.

 _Completely_  fucking regrets it.

Hands in pockets, Tony stands alone in the middle of the hallway on Five. He's not a big guy by any means, but he takes up almost the entire span between walls. He's waiting for someone.

Barnes could turn tail and head back the way he'd come, but – that'd be a little more than obvious and a little more than hard to justify. Although he'd rather keep walking—and walking and walking and walking, away, away, away—Barnes stops a few feet from Tony.

"Hey."

"You going back out sometime soon?" Tony asks.

"Yeah. Tomorrow."

To some abandoned property in northwestern Canada, near where a commercial jet disappeared from radar thirty minutes before it reappeared hundreds of kilometers away – and summarily crashed without any evidence of passengers. More than likely another test of Insight-2.

Tony's tongue pokes at his cheek as he nods. "C'mere. Up to Twelve."

Only because it's Tony, Barnes doesn't ask or argue.

His stomach drops when Tony goes to the elevator rather than the stairs. He does the math in his head—ten seconds inside the car, tops—and fortifies himself for those supremely awkward handful of seconds.

Inside, Barnes leans in the back corner, as far from Tony as possible. Tony calls him on it by leaning in the exact opposite corner – face to face, smiling with closed lips, sparkling eyes sizing him up.

Barnes watches the floors tick by—slowly, slowly, slowly—and swears Tony somehow has JARVIS decrease the elevator's speed.

"We spent a week on a deserted planet together. But the elevator gets you?"

Barnes has nothing but a shrug as a response. It hadn't been a week, either.

Tony's smile turns to a smirk. "You rip everyone else's head off. What's it gonna take?"

"Floor Twelve," a nice-sounding computer lady announces, thank god. The doors open.

Barnes pushes off the wall, replies "a time machine," and steps out into Bruce's lab.

"HYDRA has those now, you know."

Barnes ignores that, distracted by the massive patches of mismatched, uneven tiles of floor. He'd heard about the damage and something about "Captain Stupid" but hasn't been up here for weeks; Bruce had really gone to town.

Bruce spins around in his chair, genuinely thrilled. "Are you excited?"

He doesn't know why he would be, until figurative ice runs down his back. Instantly, he knows what this is about. Tongue bit—he doesn't want to meet the Hulk and Tony is still Howard's kid—he spins around, deftly sidesteps Tony, and strides back toward the elevator.

"It's not about your arm," Tony sing-songs.

"It's really not," Bruce quickly adds. "Promise."

He doesn't think they're lying, but there's nothing else it could be about. Part interested, part petrified, Barnes faces them, hoping he's not showing it. "What?"

"You ever notice how we all have suits—except Bruce, but he's literally his own suit—while you and Carter run around in what amounts to pajamas?"

Barnes thinks to argue, "They're not pa—" before he reminds himself that he's actually worn a dumb graphic t-shirt to bed and then under his tac vest for a mission. He didn't think anyone noticed.

"C'mon," Tony beckons.

Barnes follows far behind Tony and Bruce into a smaller lab space marked "Laboratory C – authorized personnel only." In black paint, someone has scrawled "HYDRA keep out"; above "HYDRA," in different handwriting, someone else added "+ Big Guy."

Inside, it's a bunch of stainless steel tables, a couple of computers, some holographic screen frames, and some bigger machines he doesn't recognize. It's all pretty standard, until he notices a dozen recesses built into the far wall, half of them lit. Each one of those six is occupied by a set of newly designed armor and marked with a nameplate.

Wilson, S.

Romanoff, N.

Rogers, S.

Hill, M.

Carter, S.

Barnes, J.

He didn't ask –

An unlikely hand clamps over his right shoulder. "What happened in July is never going to happen again.  _Nothing_  will get through that armor. Not a knife. Not a bullet. Not a bunch of drugs. Same for Carter."

After a squeeze, Tony's hand slips from his shoulder. It's never that easy with Tony, is the thing. "But! It will  _not_ keep you from putting your winter boner where it probably shouldn't go. That's on you."

Relatively sure that's Tony trying to needle some mean words out of him, Barnes distractedly says, "No. Try harder."

Tony's eyes narrow; though Barnes notices, he barely thinks twice about it.

"They're all made from a new polysynthetic Kevlar weave," Bruce interjects, only a little bit pointed. "The best part? We built in a warp shield: no more inadvertent world hopping."

That's all great.

Tony and Bruce keep talking, rattling off specs, materials, all sorts of bells and whistles, and, on Tony's end, harmless jabs and barbs. He barely hears them. He walks forward, somewhere between verklempt incredulity and undeserving euphoria.

It's all black, thick without bulk, and combat-ready with knife sheaths and weapon holsters. The material Bruce mentioned is quality, a far cry above his t-shirts and ripstops. More than that, it's not so much military as –

The left arm is sleeveless; that's perfect, because the plates of his arm chew through fabric in combat – Tony mentions a hologram there, too, so it can look sleeved. The right arm is black, ridged poly-whatever weave, smartly equipped with a sheath for a combat knife; that's perfect, too.

A raised, black Avengers "A" clearly stands out on the shoulder. He can't look away from it.

He hears Bruce say, "I think we got him, Tony."

"Good. Maybe he'll stop pissing everyone off."

Probably not, but –

This is home.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 13: The Forest by the Sea._

***

“I don’t blame her. Or you.”

Natasha hears that but hardly cares. What she, James, Steve, and Sharon have learned by now is clear: the who’s who of blame doesn’t matter.

“I blame us,” James adds. “Both of us.”

Her heart jolts - a quick skip-skip-beat. She dares to look at him and finds eyes focused through the windshield and hands loose around the flight controls.

She thinks to reply, “Can’t have it both ways.”

And he thinks to completely ignore her. “I wish I would’ve come after you that night - on the rooftop. And the nine weeks after.”

Those weeks had passed quickly, each of them a blur of missions, briefings, and semi-covert checkings-in on him. He’d been soaring, and she’d been waiting, expecting him to stumble.

He hadn’t: he’d been incredible.

Then July.

“Nine weeks is nothing,” she argues.

He’s quick to correct her. “It was everything. It happened because we don’t talk. We still don’t talk." His eyes break from the windshield, moving to her so they can pry her open. “That stuff last October happened because we don’t talk. How about we start god damn talking.”

Funny: he sounds like Steve.

“She’s dead,” Natasha notes, happily so. For everyone’s sake, it’s the best possible outcome. “It can’t happen again. Eyes forward.”

“Don’t tell me how to fly,” he gripes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: "Hands Up" by Run River North (in retrospect) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFzBmEvzYw4
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	13. The Forest by the Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes doesn’t understand, not until the two red glows ascend into the air, higher and higher, and not until gleaming red-and-gold Iron Man breaks through the top of the smog in some sort of self-congratulatory savior pose. The music cuts, just as Iron Man brings his repulsors to bear, ready to fire.
> 
> “Eat your fucking heart out, Thor. Wait… Where is everyone? Holy Jesus Christ.”
> 
> Barnes stares, adrenaline annihilating his filter. “Did you…choreograph that? Like a boy band?”
> 
> “Maybe,” Tony admits. “Did you…have an accident and kill everyone? We’ve talked about this.”
> 
> Life continues on at SHIELD, as the team tries to locate and stop HYDRA's world-ending technology. However, what they discover is that Steve Rogers is a dick when he's a HYDRA. Not that Barnes is one to talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: strong insinuation of non-con between two main characters. 
> 
> Sorry for the delay on this one! Yesterday didn't go exactly as I had planned. 
> 
> At the last minute, I decided to break this one in half again. We're up to 18 chapters overall. It paces better.

"I'm going to kill him."

Or so says Sharon, as their rental rumbles down a loose-stone road deep in the meandering labyrinth of rural Canadian backcountry.

Hands loose around the steering wheel, Barnes takes his eyes off the road for a moment, to gauge if she's serious. "Really?"

"Eyes!"

Barnes could laugh but doesn't. "I started driving when I was four on a farm in Indiana. Nothing but stone roads."

After a beat, Sharon replies, "I always forget you're ancient."

He'd almost be offended if it wasn't true. Still: he can't just let that  _go_. "I always forget you're nearly an infant. Steve robbed the fuck out of that cradle."

Too far. Way too far.

Sharon doesn't let  _that_ go, either. "At least it wasn't behind a gym mat."

Only one person could have spread that specific piece of "ha ha Barnes screwed Nat in the gym" gossip – and, oh, it's spread, if Tony's winter boner comment is anything to go by, and now Sharon's jab. Only Sam and Naceri know the other truths about July; to the rest of them, it's some sort of a joke.

Under his breath, Barnes mutters, "God damn Steve."

"Death," Sharon threatens.

It's sounding less and less like a bad idea.

After another bouncy, shaky kilometer, Sharon points out a grassy drive carved into the tree line of a road-side woods. He makes the turn, eases the sedan through the slight dip between road, ditch, and forest, and powers down the narrow lane.

Branches slap and scrape against the car. Songbirds scatter. The morning sun dims, its light captured by the canopy of burnt yellow-orange leaves.

"We're six klicks out," Sharon notes. "This is good."

He pulls over on the far right of the lane, tires crunching and snapping through twigs and dry leaves. He cuts the engine.

Before getting out, he looks at Sharon. "He told you?"

A shameless grin crinkles the corners of her eyes, because it's a joke. "Sam did a lot of weeks ago."

It's not fucking funny. Any of it.

He schools his face to hide his irritation and steps out of the car into chilly, pine-fresh air.

Past the thin tips of green conifers, a string of gray, white-capped mountains rise in the distance, nearly blending into the gray, overcast sky. Thankfully, they're not going that far today.

Sharon's door closes. "I was just giving you shit."

"Good. Me too."

He starts toward the target, Sharon beside him. The cold ground makes for effortless, quiet walking, and, all things considered, it's an easy jaunt through flat, forested terrain. Every now and then, Sharon glances at him, as if something's on her mind, but she doesn't say whatever it is.

In under twenty-five minutes, they stop at the edge of the forest. In the middle of an empty, sprawling meadow filled with long blades of faded green grass and tufts of burnt-brown weeds, their target barely stands.

A two-story farm house, the wood shingles have long turned gray, streaked with routes of black mold. The couple of windows are broken clean out of each frame. The entire structure distinctly leans to the right. There it stands, alone without a barn, a shed, a garage, or even the rusted remnants of an old vehicle or two.

Barnes listens for the hum of jet engines, for the pumping blood and hushed breaths of hidden soldiers, for the clicks and clacks of weapons. He only hears chirping birds and the whispers of wind weaving through autumn branches.

"You trust this?" Sharon asks.

He knows better than to trust anything. The answer is "no" – but he also doesn't see, hear, or sense anything out of place. Plus, they're both wearing Stark and Banner's new armor: no drug stars, no world hopping, no repeat of July.

Still yet, a slither of irrational anxiety coils in his stomach. This meadow is a lot like the one near Jesenice, the first time HYDRA took him down in seconds. Sam isn't here with his wings, and, realistically, SHIELD could never be here in time to make a difference.

"Barnes?"

He hears the reserved panic in her voice and takes a deep, supposedly-calming breath. The idea of him being afraid of a mission—especially this one—is ridiculously, does-not-compute, impossible.

"It's fine. It's me. Let's go."

As good as stepping off a cliff, Barnes crosses the threshold into the meadow, hand on his thigh-holstered sidearm. Sharon lingers a few steps behind him.

Far above their heads, an engine rumbles. Though he knows it's a commercial airplane, he looks up anyway, happy to see contrails left by the passing glint of an Airbus fuselage. The painting on the tail looks like the colors for a Transunited flight. He stands still and keeps his eyes on it, ears alert for problems on the ground. It flies away.

Sharon steps up beside him. "This is a nothing mission. Hill's not so sure about you right now. Testing the waters."

"Figured," he replies, then wonders. "You reporting back about me?"

She readily nods. At least she admits it.

Barnes shrugs it off. "Well. Let's hope the house doesn't fall on us. That'd make a shitty report."

"Would it?"

When Barnes eases open the squeaky-hinged front door, the house doesn't fall. The rotted wooden boards of the porch bend under his weight, and cobwebs stick to his arms and face, and one of those hinges falls off the door and clatters to the ground – but the house doesn't fall.

Inside the foyer, faded floral wallpaper peels from the walls in sheets, while deep cracks zig-zag up the walls. Yellowed curtains devoured by time and moths bend with the fresh breeze. Dust, dirt, dead weeds, and debris fallen from a hole in the ceiling covers the floor, almost hiding the bending, bowing floor boards.

No graffiti. No trash.

Barnes walks through the foyer and into what is identifiably a dining room. The bare floorboards creak under his boots. Every sound echoes off the thin, plaster walls.

There's an empty bookcase against the south wall, next to a broken window. Like another abandoned house not so long ago.

He walks to it and knows that it swings toward him instead of inward. He pulls on it and isn't surprised at how easily it opens to a shiny silver metal door, with a dual-access panel on the right-hand side.

Palm and eye, he remembers. If he does it, they're going to come.

"So much for that nothing mission," Sharon comments, sidearm drawn. "What is this?"

"A HYDRA safe house. It'll open to a stairwell. They might still have people down there – usually scientists, a couple guards."

Sharon cocks her eyebrows _: don't take all day._

It's a waste of time, since he's undoubtedly locked out. He's going to have to rip the door off its frame. But he'd probably appear  _unstable_  doing that, so what the hell, he straightens his right arm and presses his palm flat against the hand reader.

A wide, green light oscillates back and forth at eye level, until the whole panel abruptly lights up orange. The door slides open to a spiraling set of metal stairs, lined by dim yellow, oval lights.

Sharon peers down the stairway. "Huh. Guess they still like you."

That's the thing: they don't.

Goosebumps erupt over his arm and back of his neck. It's a killbox: down there or up here, either way. "We need to go. Now."

Sharon gives him a whole new level of side-eye. "This is the—"

Barnes breaks the window with his left arm, grabs her by the arm, and drags them both out of the house.

"What are you— Stop!"

He doesn't stop. His stomach bottoms out. His instincts  _scream_ , not because of fear.

He launches into a sprint that she can keep up with. She does, though her body is tense and nearly unwilling. He doesn't dare let go of her arm.

"Barnes—"

_Make it to the forest._

He doesn't waste breath, energy, or time answering her. He almost wants to pick her up and flat-out, dead-heat sprint through the meadow.

_Make it to the forest._

The meadow is too long. The edge of the forest looms hundreds of meters away.

_Make it._

They're never going to make it.

Behind them, the house doesn't explode. Soldiers don't pop out of the floorboards. Quinjets don't swoop in, weapons free. Nothing happens.

Yet.

_Make it to the forest._

All of a sudden, Sharon digs her heels into the ground, squats down, twists, and breaks out of his right-handed grip. She stumbles backward until she finds her footing, eyes wide, rattled, and  _angry_.

"You're not ready!" she yells. "You're not ready. There's nothing there. Don't touch me."

He steps back – either away from her or the house, he's not sure.

The wind rustles the grass in waves that shift from light to dark green. Above their heads, a flock of dark black vultures prowl in sluggish, sharply angled circles. Songbirds soar and swoop.

Like a tin can full of rocks, an alarm rattles in his head, louder and louder. He knows HYDRA better than anything, than anyone, than any other part of life.

"There's nothing there," Sharon repeats. "You— You're not ready."

Pops of familiar, blinding blue lights flash-flash-flash-flash-flash behind her.

Three sets of jet engines roar.

Booted feet patter against the grassy ground.

Voices bark hard, clipped words.

Weapons lock and load.

A unique whistling sound cuts a clean path through the crisp air. How to make a flying pie tin work for you  _but why no fucking pie, Steve_.

Barnes pushes Sharon out of the way and catches Steve's all-black shield with his left hand. Beyond it, through the tall grass and weeds, he sees Steve, two dozen armed-to-the-teeth soldiers, and three Quinjets.

_BANG!_

Sharon yelps, at the same time the shield flips into the air, at the same time his ears fill with a piercing, high-pitched ring, at the same time a blinding, white light turns the meadow, the house, the enemies too-bright, washed out, blurry, indistinct.

The fucker attached a flashbang to the shield.

Could've been worse.

Barnes keeps the fucking shield and makes a split-second decision to engage. They won't outrun those jets, they won't outrun Steve, and they won't make it to the forest without backs full of bullets. SHIELD's at least an hour and a half out, even at top speed.

Eyes squinted, Sharon steps up beside him, rifle aimed; even being able to do that much meant she hadn't caught the full brunt of the flashbang.

He hands Sharon the shield and takes down his hologram. He walks forward.

The first jet is only fifty meters away and way too low to the ground. Barnes turns his walk into a run then into that dead-heat sprint, bullets whizzing past his body and plinking off his arm, then launches into the air.

The pilot will bank to avoid him. Barnes makes sure he's right where he's supposed to be when that happens.

The pilot banks. Barnes' left foot touches down on the tip of the dipped wing. He pounds up to the midsection of the jet, punches through the canopy, and breaks the neck of the screaming pilot.

With his left hand, he yanks the dead pilot out of the seat and tosses the body at the soldiers below. As the jet soars toward a fiery fate on the ground, Barnes runs up the tilted-up wing, propels himself into the air, and latches onto the wing of the second jet with his right hand.

He spares a second to glance down, only to find Sharon taking every possible advantage of the mess he's making. The crashing, exploding jet making no difference to her, she smacks two soldiers with the edge of the shield, before shooting two others. The jet takes out five, scatters the rest, and that leaves Steve nowhere to be found.

That leaves one place where he could be.

Barnes flips up onto the jet's wing, drops to his knees and slides under Steve's swinging fist. As he goes, he pulls his sleeved combat knife, and— _it's not him—_ drives it into Steve's thigh, tip-to-hilt.

Barnes keeps ahold of the knife as he comes up onto his feet, twists around, draws power into his left arm, and gets very fucking dirty. From behind, he grabs a handful of Steve's hair with his right hand and punches Steve's kidneys once, twice –

 _Not him. It's not him_.

– before Steve takes ahold of Barnes' hand, steps backward into the hold, and flips over Barnes' head.

Steve's next move isn't at all what Barnes anticipates. Barnes thought he would either transition into a kick or bring a weapon to bear. But Steve keeps ahold of Barnes' hand, pulls Barnes off-balance and  _closer_ to Steve, and then –

Taps a rectangular blue device clipped to his black tactical vest.

Steve vanishes in a familiar, blinding blue flash.

The jet doesn't.

Barnes doesn't.

Only Steve.

The suit works.

The jet soars up, nose toward the sky, engines bleeding a mirage of wavy heat. Barnes slides down the hull, not bothering to scramble for a handhold. He pulls a ball grenade from his vest, activates it, and tosses it into the engine compartment.

A lifetime ago, he, Steve, and Becca would waste good money on Skeeball at Coney Island. He'd gotten pretty good at it.

_Boom._

Barnes drops to the ground, landing hard enough on his feet that splinters of pain shoot up his ankles. Above him, the jet explodes, and an endless array of metal, glass, fiberglass, and plastic rain and pelt against his body. The flaming wreckage folds into the ground.

Through thickening, black smoke, a soldier kicks Sharon to the ground, shoots at the shield that protects her body, and promptly kills himself with the ricochet. Not a great plan.

Sharon flips to her feet, chest pumping breaths, sweat saturating her hair, and that shield swinging much too heavily. She can't last much longer.

Steve's going to realize what happened, and he's going to come back, maybe with reinforcements. Barnes doesn't know what kind of timetable that's going to be, but it gives him the opportunity to take out the rest of the soldiers and the last jet.

He lets his rifle hang from its clip and draws his SIG Sauer. He walks into the smoke, grabs the first soldier he sees from behind, breaks the neck, and uses the body as a shield. One bullet each, he shoots five soldiers in the head, giving them each enough time to only ensure they're dead.

Only about five left, plus the last jet. Not bad. Not bad at—

Steve darts through the smoke, slides to the ground, undercuts Barnes' legs, and curls a thick arm around Barnes' neck.

"You're gonna  _like it_ ," Steve hisses into his ear, breath hot, heavy, and moist.

Probably not, but.

Steve vanishes in a flash of blue light, this time with one of his dead captors. Barnes  _thuds_ to the ground.

It's funny for the first moment. In the next, Barnes understands what Steve is facing with every failure. He knows the subtle, unending thread of desperate terror that runs under his skin.

"Get that fucking jet!" Sharon shouts, voice thin with exertion. "I've got the rest."

Barnes listens for the engines, pinpoints them, and runs toward it. He jumps, lands on the pointed-down nose, punches through the canopy, and shoots the pilot dead. In one smooth motion, he yanks that person out of the cockpit and slides inside, easily taking control and saving it from crashing.

It's their fast ticket home.

Within a few seconds, he lands the jet a step away from the wreckage, powers it down, and hops out. He trots toward the smoke and Sharon, listening for heartbeats, blood pumping, breaths – and hears a gunshot, then Sharon si—

Steve plows into Barnes, knocking them both to the ground again.

" _Steve_. It's not gonna fucking work!  _Stop_."

Steve grabs the back of Barnes' neck—the bare skin there—and slaps his blue device. Barnes' adrenaline spikes,  _oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck_  sliding through his mind, but Steve vanishes alone, in yet another blue flash.

Barnes breathes relief and wonders if this is his lif—

_BOOOOM._

Deep in the opaque, black smoke, the ground shakes and rumbles.

Barnes scrambles to his feet and runs to Sharon, stopping right beside her. This time, he doesn't take her arm, doesn't make her run – though he yearns to.

Sharon takes a defensive stance, shield brought to bear; her fatigued arms shake. Barnes aims his rifle, thinking,  _knowing_ that they're out of time. No time to run. No time to fight. Even the jet might be too far away.

Two circular red glows ease through the smoke. Barnes reaches to his vest for another grenade.

It takes a second for his ears to catch up to booming-loud, bass-thumping,  _singing_  from an audio track: "—sound of the drums beating in my heart. The thunder of guns tore me apart. You've been  _thunderstruck_.  _Yeeaah_."

Sharon brings her hand up to her face and sighs hard. At least she can hear it.

Barnes doesn't understand, not until the two red glows ascend into the air, higher and higher, and not until gleaming red-and-gold Iron Man breaks through the top of the smog in some sort of self-congratulatory savior pose. The music cuts, just as Iron Man brings his repulsors to bear, ready to fire.

"Eat your fucking heart out, Thor. Wait… Where is everyone? Holy Jesus Christ."

Barnes stares, adrenaline annihilating his filter. "Did you…choreograph that? Like a boy band?"

"Maybe," Tony admits. "Did you…have an accident and kill everyone? We've talked about this."

Barnes aims a thumb at Sharo—

A small projectile hits the suit and explodes in a haze of fiery orange, as a black-clad blur with blond hair punches Barnes in the eye, yanks the shield off Sharon's arm, and dashes away in a flash of blue.

Fireworks explode in his dimming peripheral vision. That same old pain splinters through his forehead.

Iron Man collapses into a hollow pile of pieces of suit,  _clunk-clunk-clunking_ piecemeal to the grassy, soot-soaked ground. Barnes has heard about Tony's remote suits – and how little it takes to break them.

For too many long moments, Sharon and Barnes stand right where they are, nothing really to say about any of this.

"We should get to the jet," Barnes finally remarks. Pain shoots through his eye, splintering up and up; that  _fucker_  Steve.

"Yeah." Sharon looks at him and winces. "That looks bad. How are you?"

Barnes genuinely considers that. He looks at the sprawled bodies at their feet, the smoldering wreckage of jets, and at the house that slowly, slowly, ever so slowly folds onto its side with a final sighed puff of musty dust.

"Thunderstruck."

***

A very stolen Quinjet arrives from Canada at a bit past 1300. Steve waits alone outside the base, making himself look more composed than he feels.

Sharon lands the jet a few hundred meters from the base. A second later, it's surrounded by armed guards and jet techs. The cargo door opens.

Four hours early, Sharon and Bucky walk out together, straight past the guards, but only Sharon walks by Steve with not much more than a "good morning."

Bucky stops at Steve—his swollen, black-and-blue right eye filled with blood—and doesn't bother with a "good morning." "You're a dick when you're HYDRA."

Steve can't help himself: "You're not one to talk."

Voices carry, even out here. Steve jerks his head toward the base entrance. Together, they walk through a thin, powdery layer of early snow.

"Was it a failsafe or a trap?" Steve asks.

"A trap. For sure. They came within thirty seconds, and the other you kept trying to…portal…me."

Inside, they walk up the open set of black granite steps toward the third floor. "Maria's busy with Rhodes and Canadian officials. Debrief is later. Let's go to Medical."

Steve makes the turn toward urgent care, where people are  _waiting_ for Bucky, while Bucky keeps a straight path toward the east stairwell. He's going to the gym, Steve knows it.

Bingo.

Bucky sheds the top of his new field gear down to a sweaty black t-shirt, then beelines toward the holographic bag. Trainees greet and scatter, and it's almost funny. Almost.

Steve waits for him to get a few knuckle-busting, floor-shaking punches in, for some of that fiery, adrenaline-tinged energy to wane. "Is this starting to feel personal to you?"

A flurry of thunderous punches and a hard look from Bucky preface his comment of, "It started to feel personal when they wrote a  _blood message_ on a jet windshield."

"That's what I'm saying. Do you think that's odd for them?"

Bucky shrugs and punches. "Depends on the leadership. I pissed a lot of them off with the helicarriers, and now this."

Steve pops his eyebrows, urging clarification on "now this."

"Working for SHIELD."

Right.

Nevertheless.

"I think it's more than that. They killed Fury and the other Sam. They tried to kill you in Berlin. Then they tried to kill Nat and Sam in Chișinău, then what they did in Tabernas, then July, and now this in Canada."

Bucky aborts a punch with a huffed breath. "Fury and Sam were loose ends. Chișinău was to hide their research. July was – a mess."

Steve doesn't buy that, and not only because Bucky's skipping  _a lot_. "You sure?"

Steve watches Bucky briefly reconsider, then, without another word said, keep punching at the bag again and again and again. Sweat breaks out along his soot-tinged hairline and mixes with the remnants of blood.

Frustrated, Steve waits, though not for long.

The floor-bolted emitter shoots a smattering of sparks and billows acrid smoke. The hologram dies, a slow death long coming.

Bucky huffs out another breath. "Okay. Fine. What do  _you_  think it is?"

Steve can answer that, not the way he wants but in a way someone probably should have done months ago. "Did you ever see your body? In the morgue?"

Bucky's face scrunches up, as he rubs his red-raw right fist. "What?"

"You should."

They go together, Bucky quiet and Steve even quieter, so quiet that Steve hears the rumble of Bucky's stomach.

Steve pulls out the drawer and carefully smooths out the white sheet that covers the body. The person in the drawer isn't Bucky – but it is. It is. One day, when this is all over, they'll bury him somewhere nice, somewhere safe.

They'll bury Natasha.

They'll bury Fury.

And: Steve hopes they'll bury the other version of himself.

Arms crossed, standing feet away, Bucky asks, "What am I doing here?"

"Look at the hand and knees. The autopsy report said there was evidence of a broken trachea, but you can't see it."

Steve swears Bucky pales, genuine shock written all over his face. It's the reaction of someone who  _knows_.

Obligingly, Bucky approaches the body, lifts the sheet near the right hand, looks for a moment, and then drops it. "A bullet?"

So said the autopsy report. "Yeah."

Bucky looks at both knees, asks the same question, and gets the same answer. He starts to push the drawer in, clearly uncomfortable with this exercise.

"Not done yet," Steve challenges, as he pulls the drawer all the way back out and folds the sheet down to the body's bony hips.

Bucky's eyes harden, and his expression slackens into cold neutrality. He's looking at what was nearly his fate in July and what could well be waiting in his future.

One of these times, the other Steve is going to succeed. And Bucky  _doesn't fucking get it._

Gently, Steve provides context. "This is what they did to me in 2016."

The burned HYDRA brand on his chest. Scars from knives. Scars from drills. Bullet wounds. Torso bruising and damage from being used as a literal punching bag. Other things, more hidden here but brutally apparent on an autopsy report. All of it is in nearly the same places on Steve, too precise to be coincidental. All of it except the hand, the throat, and the knees – not that.

"Whoever did that hates you, and HYDRA let them do it. Before Berlin, I didn't know what to think. Do you know?"

Stone cold, Bucky drops a string of miniature bombs. "In 2016, I did the trachea, hands, and knees to Brock Rumlow. He broke cyanide; I watched him die, then blew up the building."

Steve absorbs that as quickly as he can, only so he can provide some more important context. "He survived a helicarrier essentially dropping half the Triskelion on him."

"He was dead, Steve. But." Bucky shrugs, head tilting back and forth, capitulating on his conclusion. "Mice in his maze."

Steve doesn't know what that last part means, but he feels relief at having some sort of confirmation – followed by a strong, fearful dread.

In the last two months, not one mission went  _this_ wrong. Theories like "they got what they wanted in July" and "they're lulling us into a false sense of safety" were bandied about, but Steve doesn't think so, not after today.

Still cold, neutral, hard, and, above all, matter-of-fact, Bucky says, "Rumlow's your handler. It's revenge. And it's you doing it."

Steve swallows a sudden dry lump in his throat. He doesn't want to find Bucky's body like this, dead or alive. He doesn't want Bucky to live it.

 _Stop going on missions_ sits on the tip of his tongue. Steve could take him off every mission schedule and barely have to fight Maria to do it. He'd only have to dodge Natasha and Bucky for the rest of his life.

"It almost explains why HYDRA didn't loop the base. He's fucking with us."

It makes perfect, logical sense, the kind Bucky's always been so good at seeing; it's infinitely frustrating that Bucky sits on that piercing intuition and never says a damn  _word_ during briefings.

"Buck. These are things you need to say."

Deaf ears. "If that's true, start asking why we're not a problem for them."

Bucky makes to leave. Steve darts forward and grabs Bucky's arm, making it clear: this conversation isn't going to be over that damn easy.

" _You_  ask," Steve bites, past irritated. Unless. "Unless you already know."

Bucky jerks his arm away with an eye roll. "Whatever it is they're doing, we're nowhere close to it, and they know we can't find it. That's all I think. I'm not a fucking HYDRA mind reader. And I'm not HYDRA. Is that what you need to hear?"

That's not what Steve had meant. Not at all. "Buck—!"

"No," Bucky throws back, already nearly out the door. "Good talk. Go fucking tell everyone, you shitbag snitch. Telling everyone about the thing with the other Natasha? Really?"

 _What_ …  _Everyone_ knows about that. And it was on cam –

Fine.

Steve rubs his face and blows out a breath. After a moment, he looks at the body on the table. "You're easier to deal with. Nicer. Calmer."

"I can  _hear you_!" Bucky's voice echoes from down the hallway.

"Your hair's better," Steve adds.

The stairwell door  _slams_.

***

Melted into the couch, Barnes tilts his head and peeks between splayed fingers at his door.

A barely-there  _tap, tap, tap_  tip-toes through the steel. It's not Sam's bulldozer-esque thumping, Sharon's impatient slapping, or Steve's unquestioned knocking. It's never been Natasha.

Curious, Barnes trods to the door and opens it without warning. He half-expects no one to be there.

Steve is: sweat matting his hair into omnidirectional cowlicks, face shiny, lines under his eyes. His drawing tablet is clenched in his right hand.

"I didn't know if you'd be awake. Are you up?"

Barnes makes room for Steve to come inside. As dry as can be, he answers, "No. I'm asleep."

Steve beelines to the couch and wilts onto it. His long legs push the coffee table toward the TV by inches. "Real Housewives?"

"Sure," Barnes replies. He can't stand the show, but Steve  _adores_  it. "That's why you came?"

Steve expertly navigates Hulu and puts on his show, while Barnes gets comfortable next to him: crosslegged, a pillow on his lap, the fluffy cushions hitting the right points on his back. Between the two of them, they take up the entire couch.

Steve draws in a deep breath. "I have this nightmare where I bust your head open with my shield."

Barnes' arms tighten around the pillow. "Well… How does my hair look – when you do it?"

Steve laughs like he doesn't want to. "Not great. But seriously."

But seriously. "I have this nightmare where you're dead before you hit the water. Or I can't find you, and you drown. Or I pull you out, and it's too late. And I'm me, not him. Had it tonight."

Again.

They look at each other, all their dreams hanging between them, and Barnes can't hold back a closed-lipped smile. It's not funny – but their irony is absurd.

"God, you're fucked up," Steve breathes.

" _Me_? It's two in the morning, and you're coming to watch Housewives and tell me about your dreams."

Steve shifts so that he's leaning away, a tinge upset. The Housewives bicker, fight, and cry, while sitting around a long dining table overstuffed with food, plates, and centerpieces; apparently, they're rubbing off on Steve.

Barnes tilts his head toward Steve. "How bad was my hair?"

He captures a smile. "Better than it looks now."

"Oh,  _fuck you_."

The smile lasts a few seconds more, then Steve picks at the skin of his thumb, face relaxing. "I think of you in that room."

Barnes doesn't know what room Steve's talking about. There've been lots of rooms.

"Everything you said. Everything you tried to do. 'I'm good with this.'" Oh. Death Valley. "Were you? When I – he did  _that_?"

Steve's swerved away from Death Valley and moved right to the body in the morgue that, unquestionably, the other Steve left riddled with cruel scars.

The answer to Steve's question of "would you be okay with me doing what he did to you?" is  _I don't know_. More than that, it doesn't matter.

"It didn't happen to us," Barnes says.

"It would've."

Sharply, Barnes argues, "It didn't."

Equally as sharp, Steve bites, "I fantasized about it."

 _Oh, Jesus Christ_ , Barnes thinks, exasperated.  _HYDRA was drugging you_  won't matter.  _Nothing_ will matter. It's a battle he won't win.

On the TV, a never-married "housewife" runs from another housewife, who soon begins to cry. Barnes pretends to watch and kind of hates that he knows each of their marital statuses.

Steve barrels forward, hopping and skipping around painful topics. "Kill him. When the time comes, you kill him, Buck. Don't try to save him. Don't try to talk him down. End it."

Logically, objectively: no shit. Otherwise: Steve is Steve, neither of them deserved HYDRA, and neither of them deserve to die for it.

" _James_."

If Steve wants Barnes to look at him, that fucking does it. Steve hasn't called him "James" since – ever. Speechless, Barnes stares at Steve.

Resolute, Steve's eyes burn into Barnes'. "Kill him. Promise me."

 _Don't put that on me_ battles  _who else?_  Might as well be him to do it, and it's exactly why Steve's asking.

He'd killed for HYDRA. He can kill for Steve.

"I promise."

Steve visibly swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing, and accepts the promise with an upset nod. Steve breaks the stare and turns his attention to the TV, though he can't possibly be watching it.

An irritating, restless tension stretches between them, as the Housewives gossip while trying on ugly shoes.

Fuck that.

"How was my fucking hair, you asshole snitch?"

Steve turns a stunned, irritated look on Barnes, who waits for an answer with raised eyebrows and a straight face. Barnes wishes he could know what Steve is thinking.

Steve thinks he wants to hug Bucky, while asking how he still has his cutting sense of humor. But he doesn't do either, not right now.

No, right now, Steve lightly whacks Bucky's left arm, prompting him to take down the hologram. The illusion of skin obligingly shimmers away into silver and an ever-brightening red star peeking through an ever-fading strip of black spray paint.

Steve prefers the hologram, but he knows that Bucky doesn't. The bare arm leaves nothing hidden between them, nothing pretended. They are who they are, both of them, for better, for worse.

And, oh, it's been  _worse_ since July, albeit getting better. Maybe.

"Well, earlier, it was  _shitbag_  snitch – so, is that better?" Steve asks, playing Bucky's game.

Bucky smiles, a long time coming. "No, it's worse."

"Thought so."

Steve wakes up his tablet, snaps his stylus from its casing, and opens a sketch of an imaginary world he's been working at for three weeks. Bucky reaches for a thick book on the floor; its spine satisfyingly  _cracks_.

The Housewives shop, gossip, and backbite; Steve doesn't know why he likes the show, but it makes for good background noise.

And this, right here – it's not Brooklyn and certainly not the late '30's, but it's close enough.

Pages flip – twenty, thirty of them.

Episodes begin and end.

Bucky breaks the silence. "You want something real to paint?"

Steve lifts an eyebrow. "Can't turn that down. What are you thinking?"

Without taking his eyes off the page, Bucky replies, "My arm. Your shield. I've been thinking about it."

Bucky doesn't offer more, and Steve doesn't dare lose this chance by asking for more. He rushes to get his industrial-grade paint, leftover from a project he never finished eleven months ago.

Before starting, Steve checks, "You sure?"

Eyes on the book, Bucky nods, slow and sure.

Good enough.

Steve dips brushes into drip-splotched bottles and swipes his colors over HYDRA's metal. His knee digs into Bucky's thigh, while his free hand rests between layers of metal, upraised scars of skin, and bunched-up t-shirt fabric.

Bucky reads, never second guessing, never checking, never explaining.

With calming precision and soothing focus, Steve paints over the red star and rings it with perfectly curved circles.

He forgets to glance up at Bucky for reassurance, his concentration wholly centered on the shield, his brushes, his paint.

Pages flip – eighty or ninety more of them.

Episodes begin and end, at least five of them, so many that Steve has to remind Hulu that he's still watching.

Steve slides his knee down between Bucky's thighs and shifts his body to give the clearest access to the edge of Bucky's arm.

Bucky keeps reading, sitting still in only a way a lifelong sniper can.

He finishes filling in one of the spaces with careful ticks of the brush and reaches to switch to a new brush and color.

The book folds.

Bucky's head drops onto Steve's chest, his forehead pressed into Steve's sternum. There's something less tense about him, less raw – and more openly vulnerable than Steve has ever seen.

All the bluster from 0200 sinks down, too heavy to carry. "I'm not HYDRA."

"I know. We all know."

Steve happily rests his spare hand on the nape of Bucky's neck, and he doesn't miss the subtle, almost imperceptible way Bucky relaxes into that touch.

Natasha's mentioned how much Bucky craves touch, one of her many shrewd ways of ensuring Bucky's been cared for all these months. Naceri's even told Steve about the early research on the possible healing link between touch, oxytocin, and trauma, without her ever realizing he'd been asking about one person in particular.

Steve's careful not to nudge his arm or get careless with the brush in his hand. "I'm not done yet," he notes.

"'Cause you're fucking slow." Bucky's voice sounds thick and forced – emotional. "And a jerkbag snitch."

Steve huffs out a laugh, all the while thinking that they're here. They're both really here, and they have this, whatever this is, but they have it.

Tomorrow, it could end, as quickly as it had seemed to last October and then in July. Tomorrow, another fate worse than death could steal Bucky away again.

_Kill him, Buck._

Outside, yellow-orange leaves crinkle and scatter with the cool, mid-October wind.

***

In the morning, Barnes blearily blinks at the contents of the refrigerator, seeing straight past six fresh brown eggs, a bundle of bright green spinach, a half-empty jar of almond butter, an assortment of high-end cheese, even more kinds of meat, and orange juice.

His stomach grumbles, and he checks the time on the oven: 8:02. 0700 is usually when the Cafeteria is at its busiest; 08 is when it gets slow. That decides it for him.

Barnes closes the refrigerator door and glances at the colorful alphabet magnets to see what nasty combination of swear words Sharon's come up with.

None. All of the letters are pushed off to the side of the door, except for nine: I TRUST YOU.

Barnes considers those three words for longer than he'll ever admit, surprised to see them – and relieved to find them from her. For all Sharon will ever know, he pays it no further mind than his response of DITTO JIZZFUCKER.

He heads down a floor toward the Cafeteria, taking his time to get there; the longer he takes, the less people will be inside.

A paper banner made of smiling orange jack-o-lanterns hangs in soft, loose dips across both hallway walls. A black-paper cut-out of a flying witch dangles in the center of the threshold into the Cafeteria, while a bowl of individually-wrapped chocolate candy has been set inside the doorway. He sneaks a handful of the candy into his pocket.

In the Cafeteria, he collects a fair amount of food, takes an invisible deep breath, and sits down across from Natasha. She's still wearing gear from last night's mission, and the tired set of her eyes says that the half-eaten tray of food in front of her is a very late dinner.

She slouches and props a foot on the seat of his chair, a white plate and a messy, egg-tastic burrito held under her mouth. She puts her attention on his eye. "HYDRA Steve is a jerk."

The gossip machine around here churns  _fast_.

"Dick," Barnes replies. "He's a dick."

Natasha smiles.

***

Barely two weeks later, Natasha waits at the flight controls of Quinjet Eight, Sam's seat next to her empty. She glances at her watch and gives him five more minutes, before she radios Ops to find out –

Quick footsteps echo down the flight deck and near closer to the jet. They don't sound like Sam's typical walking pattern. In fact, they sound like –

James.

Heart irrationally attacking her throat, Natasha looks over her shoulder and sees James trot up the ramp, geared for a mission.

The stories about his cutting temper and harsh outbursts have become less frequent; word on the proverbial street is that he's even doubled down on therapy with Naceri. It shows. He looks good: always tired but clean, hair freshly cut, face smooth, eyes bright.

He sees her, blinks, and doesn't miss a step. He pops a sealed reusable cup of coffee into the tertiary flight chair's cupholder—away from the electronics—and slides into Sam's waiting seat.

"You're not Sharon," James dryly comments.

"You're not Sam," Natasha retorts as dryly, hoping he misses the tight sound of her voice.

James considers that for a moment, nods to himself, and all but hisses, "He's meddling."

 _Steve_ is meddling.

Natasha agrees but her focus, apparently unlike James, is to simply manage through the next dozen or so hours. Ten minutes at breakfast is one thing. A fourteen-hour mission is pushing it - whatever "it" is.

Under James' uniform, she can't see the wide, pearly-red scars that she's glimpsed for months. He's only safe here, instead of suffering there, because of dumb, blind luck.

"Want me to fly?" James asks, tone drenched in worried sincerity.

A flush threatens to turn her face red; she refuses it. "Why—"

A female voice from Control says, "Quinjet Eight, Control, do you read? Fourth attempt."

James doesn't say "that's why."

If it was anyone else, the answer would be "no, I'm fine." It's still James, and she still knows he'd never judge her that way.

Natasha nods, flips primary flight controls to him, and takes Nav for herself.

"Control, Quinjet Eight, I read you five. Request pushback," James says, picture perfect by flight guidelines, until: "And Rogers: just wait."

Every protocol broken, Steve dives atop the bait and swallows it whole. Over the comm, his voice comes through, loud and clear: "What? What does that mean?"

"Just wait," James promises, sounding threatening to only those who don't know him. He won't even hurt the version of Steve who wants to literally cut, burn, shoot, and punch him apart. "Not me."

That last part was directed at her. A fiery rush of shame screams at her to abort the mission, and then follow through on James' empty threat to do some sort of harm to Steve.

Can't do that – any of it. The world needs them to be something like functional.

"It's different," she replies, neutral and even, removed and cold. "Don't do that."

Steve's voice argues: "Sam's sick. Said it was something from dinner last night. And Sharon said she had the same thing."

James ignores Steve, talks to Control, then snorts out a bitter, scoffing laugh at her. "Whatever you say, Muffin."

Not today.

The jet raises up into the dim, late October morning.

The dark gray sky spits thick raindrops at them, promising a limited window to get ahead of the oncoming storm. The landing pad locks into place; soon after, James engages the engines, lifts them up, and blasts into the sky.

It's not long after reaching altitude, before he says, "I don't blame her. Or you."

Natasha hears that but hardly cares. What she, James, Steve, and Sharon have learned by now is clear: the who's who of blame doesn't matter.

"I blame us," James adds. "Both of us."

Her heart jolts - a quick skip-skip-beat. She dares to look at him and finds eyes focused through the windshield and hands loose around the flight controls.

She thinks to reply, "Can't have it both ways."

And he thinks to completely ignore her. "I wish I would've come after you that night - on the rooftop. And the nine weeks after."

Those weeks had passed quickly, each of them a blur of missions, briefings, and semi-covert checkings-in on him. He'd been soaring, and she'd been waiting, expecting him to stumble.

He hadn't: he'd been incredible.

Then July.

"Nine weeks is nothing," she argues.

He's quick to correct her. "It was everything. It happened because we don't talk. We still don't talk."

His eyes break from the windshield, moving to her so they can pry her open. "That stuff last October happened because we don't talk. How about we start god damn talking."

Funny: he sounds like Steve.

"She's dead," Natasha notes, happily so. For everyone's sake, it's the best possible outcome. "It can't happen again. Eyes forward."

"Don't tell me how to fly," he gripes.

Steve's voice fills the cockpit: "Quinjet Eight, your comm's on. Might wanna…"

As Steve trails off, leaving the rest of his thought unvoiced, James sighs and mutes the open comm channel. "Fan-fucking-tastic."

Ditto. All of Ops heard them, because Steve tends to be a pushy, headstrong busybody. Threatening him sounds too kind.

"We have a mission. Focus."

James shakes his head and grits his teeth, but those five words seem to do the trick.

Tense, bitter silence envelopes them, while Natasha mostly pretends to monitor navigation. At this altitude, and this far from their target site, there isn't much to monitor.

Twenty minutes later, James blurts, "I love you."

Natasha tries to discourage him with a furious, hard glare, but he decides to affably taunt her with "tell me you don't."

She can't and won't do that, and, so, she willingly steps into his trap. "You know that I do."

He accepts that, though not in the way she had expected. "Then we're wasting time. More time."

Natasha has her own trap to set. "Show me your hand."

The asshole jerk that he is, he raises his left one and dissolves the ever-present hologram into bare silver metal. He even wiggles it. "Pretty neat."

Everyone else describes these moments as "been around Tony too much." She knows better: it's a mild upswing, part of how he cycles through moods. The downswing's somewhere around the corner.

A standard alarm  _beeps,_ and she takes the time to check and silence it. When she looks back over at James, his uniform jacket pools at his waist, leaving him wearing a black t-shirt, with his right arm and neck bared.

His throat is a ring of pearlescent scarring, which will never fade enough to not be obvious. His right hand is the same.

She voices a thought. "I promised you a bullet."

And he  _laughs_. "That's what I said." The non-smile and the mirthless laugh vanish. "And then I killed her."

" _Good_ " stands on the tip of her tongue. He knows better than to mourn her, to mourn that. She knows better than to say it so tactlessly.

Natasha decides on: "I never want to be that again. I owe you one, if the time comes."

James can't argue that, and she knows he wouldn't. It's only – Being on base, with Steve and Sam and Sharon, has undeniably softened him to their once-was world. It's not always a good thing.

As evidenced by…

"It was slow. She bled to death – femoral." Eyes superficially focused on the brightening skies, he adds, "She didn't want to die."

In the Red Room, he'd taught them only how to make quick kills. There'd never been a time, a moment, where she could say he was sadistic, or took joy in death, or wanted any of his targets—their targets—to suffer. "Goodhearted" is at once both painfully naïve and wretchedly accurate.

"She didn't know to," Natasha corrects, trying and failing to catch his eyes. "Trust me."

His only response is a deep breath and, finally, that terse silence she'd wanted earlier. He shrugs on his jacket, sleeves sure to cover the scars.

"In October last year." A year ago now. Time flies, when the world keeps upending. "What if I'd found the Winter Soldier? What should I have done?"

He closes his eyes and nods acceptance of the only solution to her hypothetical. "I know that." Then, he lolls his head toward her, back to his up-swung mood. "Doesn't it feel nice to talk?"

Not when he's an asshole dick about it.

***

"Motherfucking Sharon."

An eyebrow raised, Natasha glances at him, silently asking him to clarify that.

Barnes is happy to oblige. "It wasn't Steve. It was  _her_. She's not sick – she was pounding on a bag in the gym two hours ago."

Natasha argues just to fucking argue. "You don't know that. How long has it been since you've had food poisoning?"

That deserves a skeptical look, and he gives it one. He's been superhumanly  _sick_ , and  _she's_ seen it. And he fucking remembers what it was like to get humanly sick. Also: "You realize she was going for a run toward the forest, when we were lifting off, right?"

A small, infinitesimal smile pulls at Natasha's lips. "Getting a head start. Smart."

"She'll need one."

It's definitely Sharon meddling. After all that shit about  _him_ not meddling with her and Steve.

Can do and done.

"You're doing okay?"

Natasha doesn't mean now, at the flight controls, or even in a few hours, when they touch down for a mission he barely knows anything about. She means since July.

"Getting there," he honestly replies. "We have good people."

People who've been more patient than anyone,  _anyone_ deserves. Who've been more compassionate, supportive, and  _stubborn_. The idea of "home" isn't something that should exist in their world, but what the hell.

"Is it easy yet?" she wonders, tone telling him she already expects his likely answer of  _hell no_.

"I'm not leaving, if that's what you're wondering."

In his peripheral, he notices her eyebrows quirk up, followed by a brief head shake. "Why did you stay?"

Yeah. That  _is_ the better question.

Early on: because leaving would've meant being out on his own, but with all of HYDRA's drugs strong in his system and all the vulnerabilities that'd come with that.

Later on: because leaving would've meant being out on his own and probably never seeing them again. Devastating Steve. Abandoning Sam. Betraying Natasha. Wasting it all, when it was all,  _all_ right there.

And…

"Tony never had to forgive me the way he did. Doesn't have to be the way he is."

Natasha's lips quirk into an aborted smirk, likely because  _the way Tony is_ to the rest of them is bordering on  _obnoxious_ ,  _exhausting_ ,  _always-on_. Meanwhile, Tony's glibly tried and tried and failed and failed to jab at Barnes' until Barnes has snapped, despite them both knowing  _exactly_ what it would take. (Boner jokes aren't exactly it.)

"I owe all of you, but I owe him more. It's not taking off and screwing everybody."

Something about having that t-shirt.

Natasha's smirk coalesces. "Love you too."

Though sorely tempted, he avoids taking that bait. It's not like that. He knows how much of this life he owes her, not that he's ever acknowledged it.

Ahead of them, the sunrise over the Atlantic washes the horizon sky in vanilla: soft yellow blurring into blue, covered by wispy red clouds that congregate below them in thick tufts. Before long, as they fly nearer to Latvia, the morning will turn to early afternoon.

Natasha inquires, "Is it still the best part of the day?"

Referring only to the sunrise.

"It's another day," he replies.

"Since then?"

He frowns and gives his head a shake. "Since here."

Natasha doesn't answer, doesn't say anything.

Their radio crackles with static, followed by the voices of a few commercial airline pilots. Pretty normal.

"I'm here," Barnes presses.

Natasha leans back in her chair and stuffs her hands into her jacket pockets. She's wearing a casual black puffer jacket over her combat suit – something so mundane and average that she barely looks like herself.

Or maybe she does look like herself, while he doesn't know her how he once did.

Against the backdrop of the sunrisen sky, her hair seems more red. No painted lips this morning. No color on her nails.

At a steady altitude, far away from the low-flying airliners, with a couple thousand miles to go, Barnes sets auto-pilot and mirrors Natasha's body language. Although he wants to scream  _I'm here,_ he lets it hang.

And hang.

And hang.

After a time, she wonders, "Are you? Or are you there with her?"

His sigh comes as a curling wisp of white, and he takes a moment to jack up the heat inside the cabin. Otherwise, the finish line keeps moving around, and he can't fucking win, but that's a fair enough question. "If I was, would it change – what we are?"

A mocking smile twists her bare lips. "What are we?"

A pang of irritation speaks for him. "Not worth it."

She has nothing to say to that, and, fine, great, that's great. He's stuck here in a jet, with nowhere to go and nowhere to run, and they haven't even  _started_ the mission yet.

All kidding aside:  _fuck_ either Steve or Sharon for doing this. It's a giant fucking favor, that he  _can't wait_ to re—

Out of the blue, Natasha takes his right wrist. He even lets her do it. Immediately, her fingers crawl up his sleeve and rub the white, ringed scar.

"No." He yanks his arm away. "Not god damn me. I mean it."

Her gaze lands on his throat, where a similar scar is hard to hide. "Not quite love."

 _That's_ what this is? He knows his mouth is gaping open, eyes wide. "Are  _you_ there with her?"

Natasha stills – but nods, something like guilty shame reflected in her eyes.

Mouth open, a whole slew of things to be said cross his mind:  _it wasn't you, you're not her, it doesn't matter._ All of it demands to be said, but he knows—not to. He's already said he blames her.

From that open mouth, he pushes out another sigh and shakes his head, shrugs, and spins around in a full circle, hands buried in his hair.

Natasha looks at him with deep worry, as if he's going haywire. He's only flying a god damn jet right now, spinning circles in his chair.

"I don't know what to say to that," he admits, partly giving up and partly begging her to help him. She doesn't. "We end there?"

Simple, she thinks and all but says. "How could we not."

"Great. We live by what HYDRA takes. That's perfect."

She looks at him as if he's smacked her, the vulnerability splashed across her face resembling the same one from that room, when he'd sliced open her femoral.

In an instant, she composes herself. "You could do or be anything. Slate's clean. Ledger's black. What would it be?"

The same question she'd ask him atop Stark Tower in October 2016, two years ago. That same invincible, affable feeling from then wraps around him, familiar like hair cream, like navy blue, like books, like boxing and cooking and laughing and a time and person long past but somehow,  _somehow_ still here.

"I'd be here. Right here. And that's it." He means it: he's never letting this place go. It's home, and the people are ones he loves. "Are we done wasting time?"

Natasha inhales, deep and damn near shuddering. "I don't know. Focus on the mission."

Right.

***

Latvia is a country of vibrant, verdant forest. This close to the sea, the groundcover remains green and bright, dotted with thickets of needle-laden conifers, while dense treetops are tinged with prescient reds and yellows. The sky above couldn't be a deeper shade of blue, while the chittering of a hundred small birds build into a pleasant descant.

Simply: it's a nice day.

As they walk side-by-side across a sea of brittle leaves, Natasha sneaks a sideways glance at James, who meets that glance head-on with expecting eyes and an annoying closed-lipped smile.

"Stop," she orders.

Like a child, he argues, "You looked at me first."

And she isn't afraid of telling him: "You're acting like a child."

"God forbid."

Without question, it would be easier to say "fine, we're together again." It would be even easier to have postponed this mission and to have gone about their lives, exactly the way they have been for – well over a year, now.

Except he's right: every misstep, every day and week and month of turmoil, was because they don't talk, treating each other invisibly.

Those thoughts die in her throat.

They walk, together but apart.

"Steve thinks I enlisted because of Pearl Harbor. My mom read about everything, all the reports coming out of every country. Romania. Poland. Latvia. A massacre happened in a forest like this in winter '41, around the same time. It wasn't her family – anyone she would've known. But maybe it's the same way her family was killed. I was  _waiting_ to enlist, for the U.S. to fucking do something."

Natasha doesn't know who all knows about that part of him: the part he denies except when it comes to his mother, and the part he loathes because of everything he'd done for HYDRA and the Soviet Union. She'd put good money on no one knowing except for her and Steve.

" _Your_  family," Natasha amends, likely having ceded that right months ago. Nevertheless. "Rogers knows more than you give him credit for."

The attempted conversation chills to an abrupt end.

Together, the step over a thick, fallen log, and, together, they sidestep a sludgy puddle. Ahead, a dry creek bed lined by thick grass on either side, precisely where it should be. It marks 10 kilometers until their destination of what satellite imagery reveals to be an abandoned campus of three small school buildings and a playground.

Natasha chances another glance at James and finds a tense jaw and an annoyed pull of his brow. She reaches out, fingers taking hold of the back of his right arm, when he jerks it away.

Tone assertive rather than angry, James barks, "Either we are, or we aren't. Stop."

Natasha drops her hand, thinking that's fair –

"And Steve's a fucking idiot," James adds in. "It's going in the AAR."

It's enough that Natasha cracks a grin, followed by an inescapable thought that burrows from her brain into her chest:  _I miss you_.

_And so did she._

Hesitant scrabbles of daytime animals, songs of flitting birds, and the gentle rushing of cool wind kindly fills another bouts of their silence. Nearby, the swishing water of the Venta bleeds through the dense treescape.

Nothing hidden amongst those trees tickles her instincts. Even as she scans the leaves, the needles, the bark, the sunlit shadows, she knows: there's nobody here, not right now. Not for kilometers, at least.

"It's nice here," James quietly comments.

Hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, shoulders relaxed, short hair shifting with the breeze, with a hint of a frown giving age lines to his too-young face, Natasha observes a dichotomous mix of content unease.

He's nervous, even though he's seeing the same landscape as she is. He's nervous, because it's a mission, she realizes. Out of his last three, two have gone to hell.

"It was a low intensity gamma signal; we detected it three days late," she says, the space between the lines clearly indicating  _this is another nothing mission_ ,  _and it's the best we're able to do._ "In and out."

"'Kay."

She leaves it.

The dry creek winds north, and, when it does, they keep east for another five kilometers. At the bottom of a grassy hill, they silently agree to stop to gear up.

James, she notes, retrieves nine pieces of an AR-15 from his backpack, nimbly assembling the weapon within seconds.

As she checks her sidearms, her knives, her taser discs, and a new little emergency gizmo, James shrugs on a tactical vest. He pops three grenades into the vest and a handful of flashbangs into his utility belt.

He really is nervous.

Natasha slides on her gauntlets.

Together, they scale the hill and come up to a fertile, weed-filled meadow. Five hundred meters beyond, three short, white buildings stand innocently: each of them no more than four stories tall, each of them with evenly spaced, symmetrical windows, and each of them deteriorating into peeling paint, shattered glass, and crumbling brick.

When Natasha pushes open a rusted wrought-iron gate, its hinges ferociously squeaking and threatening to disintegrate, James sighs, "Well, this is totally fucking Soviet."

***

In the middle of the three buildings, a utilitarian plaza full of grass, long-legged weeds, and overgrown bushes keeps a playground. Barnes flicks a painted-blue, metal frame of a slide with his left index finger and thumb. The actual  _slide_ is missing: it's only the frame and the steps.

_Clang!_

Paint's still good, though old. Metal's still solid, though older.

A couple of swingsets, an off-kilter merry-go-round, and a type of jungle gym round out the fun.

Otherwise, no trash, and no graffiti. There's always trash, and there's always graffiti.

Barnes loosens his grip on his AR-15 and takes a set of crumbled stairs to what they're calling Building #2. The door to the doorway he enters through doubles as flooring.

Thick layers of gray and white dust coat the crumbled remains of the floor. Piles of gravel spotted with wind-delivered dirt and sprouts of misguided plants sit as equally undisturbed. Together, it tells him that no one has been in this hallway for years.

The hallway itself is wide. The walls are painted pale orange on bottom and pale yellow on top, still quite smooth despite the peeling, cracked plaster and crawling swaths of black mold. Above him, the ceiling hasn't fared so well: he can see up to the next floor.

Putrid scents of mildew and mold hang heavy.

Barnes avoids a pile of ceiling debris, deliberately toes over a stack of decomposed books, and heads down the hallway. Doors dot the corridor, each of them guarding empty rooms filled with old wood desks, decrepit chalkboards, and empty, half-collapsed bookcases.

The entire floor is the same way.

He bites back the urge to ask JARVIS to scan for activity. These days, protocol is to use JARVIS as a last resort, "just in case" HYDRA's found a way to monitor them that way.

His instincts tell him: no one's here, not anymore. It'd be nice to quickly confirm that and go home.

Nevertheless, he scales a set of moisture-laden, concrete stairs. The way his boots sink into them is another clue: his are the only sunken footsteps.

On the next two floors, he only finds classrooms, some office spaces, and a large suite of empty, iron bedframes without evidence of shackles or handcuffs.

An orphanage, maybe. A boarding school. Nothing more nefarious than that.

Instead of going back down, Barnes finds easy roof access through a service stairwell and dares to step foot onto the blacktop. If he falls straight through, he'll look like a bigger idiot than Steve – talk about a tall order.

He doesn't fall straight through. As he walks, he finds more than a few soft spots that threaten to buckle, but the fresh air is a welcome relief. Above, the sky is bluer than blue, and the sun is warm and bright.

But the birds don't sing.

Animals don't scramble.

Insects don't drone.

If he never steps foot in HYDRA territory again, he'd be okay with that.

Barnes survives the entire length of the roof. He stops at the edge and peers down at the playground, in time to see Natasha exit Building #1 and look up at him.

Natasha shakes her head: negative.

Figured.

He gestures his head toward Building #3: one more to go. Without waiting for Natasha to signal "affirmative," he hops off the roof and crunches into the grass-devoured concrete of the playground.

"Showing off?" Natasha coyly asks.

"Only for you, Muffin."

With that, he heads for Building #3, before she has a chance to kill him. Nevermind needing to survive the hours they have left, between getting back to the jet and then flying back across the Atlantic.

Building #3 is an amalgam of maintenance space, storage, classrooms, more bedframes, and what seems to be a cafeteria.

Inside that cafeteria, Barnes and Natasha walk between disheveled rows of four-person wood tables. Barnes glances up at the domed ceiling, noting a faded mural depicting four heroic Tupolevs, an obligatory red star, and what might be a fucking TARDIS.

Like, seriously. "Is that a TARDIS?"

"What's a TARDIS?" Natasha asks, expression telling him she's serious.

What a great opening. The Bucky in him takes full, fearless advantage of it. "We're both off Friday. Come over and find out."

She lifts a skeptical eyebrow.

"We can binge. It'll sure as hell beat Steve's House—"

Pops of familiar, blinding blue lights flash-flash-flash-flash-flash behind her – and, from the hard expression that overcomes her face, behind him, too.

Barnes takes his hologram down.

Natasha taps her gauntlets together, powering them up.

Game on.

He runs toward a smattering of, oh, twelve soldiers.

Still, to this day, HYDRA idiots see his arm and step back a little.

He doesn't stop running.

Bullets fly, and he's really glad that they haven't learned to aim at the knees. It occurs to him to worry that a stray bullet might hit Natasha, but: it's Natasha. She can more than take care of herself.

The bullets  _plink, plink, plink_  off of his left arm; if they hit anywhere else, he doesn't feel them through the adrenaline.

He raises his AR-15 and sprays bullets at their legs, less concerned with killing and more concerned with cutting right through them. The faster they're out of contention, the faster he and Natasha can get out of here.

He counts three down and out. Seven left.

Barnes spins behind a white support pillar, a rash of bullets shredding the old stone.

He spares a glance up: deep, thick cracks splinter at its top. If the pillar comes down, the roof and three floors of shit might come with it.

He's gotta move.

Barnes pulls a flashbang from his belt, yanks the pin, and tosses it at the seven soldiers. He hears two coming around his way, and he simply steps out from cover and shoots them both.

He doesn't bother covering his eyes. The flashbang flashes and bangs, and he trots straight past the five moaning and groaning soldiers, shooting them as he goes.

Barnes clears the back end of the cafeteria for hidden, lingering threats, finding none. He heads back toward Natasha, watching her flip, twirl, punch, jab, and kick clean through twelve of her own pests.

He could help out, but why insult her.

Natasha loops an arm around one of the last soldiers, spins her body around the soldier's torso, and uses her momentum to (1) kick the fuck out of a second soldier and (2) break the neck of the first.

He'd taught her that, and she's amazing.

The last soldier drops, dead.

Eerie, unsettling silence washes through the cafeteria. Heavy particles of dust audibly sprinkle against the tabletops.

Natasha catches his eyes, her head tilting infinitesimally.

He senses it, too.

 _Crack. Craaaaaaack_.

Barnes wastes a split second to look up and see a long, deep splinter cutting those heroic Tupolevs in half.

He lunges for Natasha.

The ceiling collapses: dust, plaster, and asbestos pouring into the air and ballooning after them.

With barely a split second to spare, he grabs her arm, pulls her in close, and wraps his body around hers. Together, they careen to the pitted, grimy floor, Natasha's body skidding through a pile of old debris.

Rock, concrete, books, tables, and desks pelt against his back, burying them – but not hurting her.

_Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud._

He counts ten more  _thuds_ after that.

HYDRA'd portaled to the other stories. The entire building has to be swarming with them – if not the entire campus.

They have to get fighting and get going, or this is going to end as badly as July.

His heart skips. He can't let it.

"James,  _go_ ," Natasha commands, her voice cutting through his fear.

With her strength, Barnes roars up, all the stupid debris tumbling away. From under him, Natasha slides away and flips up, taking an offensive combat position within a second.

And Barnes?

Ducks the sharp, vicious edge of Steve's swinging shield. Without second guessing, without doing much more than reacting, Barnes comes back up with a fiercely violent left hook, nothing of it spared.

Steve reels backward into a lunch table, hitting it hard enough to fall backward, and falling hard enough to break the native, thick wood clean in half. Steve hits the floor with a  _poof_ of dust.

Somewhere next to him, Natasha attacks one of the ten soldiers. "Neutralize him. I have them," she says, cool and even.

He doesn't bother answering, so much as spinning around and batting a  _fucking chair_  out of the air. It splinters into a handful of termite-devoured pieces, then clatters to the ground.

As Steve flips up, shield primed, a HYDRA soldier tries to sneak up on Barnes from behind. Barnes elbows that soldier in the head, at the same time that soldier's head becomes hollowed by one of Natasha's bullets.

"I told you I have them," Natasha states in passing.

Fine.

Right.

Whatever.

Steve.

Barnes unclips and drops the AR-15 – it's too unwieldy for hand-to-hand combat, plus its mag is running low – then draws his favorite combat knife. By habit alone, he twirls it through his fingers – and immediately notices the quick glimpse of fear it triggers on Steve's face.

_Kill him, Buck._

That's –

Shield at the ready, Steve charges toward him. Barnes launches into his own dash, straight toward Steve, planning on sliding under him, flipping up and around, and taking Steve from behind.

It also happens to be Steve's plan.

And, so, they happen to slide into each other, ending in an inconveniently vulnerable tangle of legs, plus a shield, and a knife.

The shield swings at Barnes' head, edge-first. Barnes tilts back to avoid it, as he brings his knife down toward the top of Steve's thigh. Steve rolls to avoid the knife and tries to take the shield with him, but Barnes grabs the shield with his left hand –

Twists it –

And snaps Steve's arm in half, on purpose, using the shield as a fulcrum to do it. One of the straps snaps clean off, allowing Barnes to slide the shield free.

Steve screams, then kicks Barnes in the jaw.

Barnes rolls backward and then flips to his feet. He wastes a second by surveying the mess Natasha has on her hands—one she has under total control—and then rockets the shield at a line of uneasy, overly hesitant, superbly scared HYDRA soldiers.

"I. Have. Them." Natasha snaps. "City full of aliens. Where were you?"

That was mean.

Steve's hand curls around Barnes' hair from behind, and Barnes  _knows_ what's going to come next: a knife in the back. He knows Steve well enough to know.

He feels the tip of Steve's blade, a hair of a split second after Barnes kicks off a table and tosses himself over Steve's head. Steve steps into a knife attack that he can no longer complete, losing critical footing.

Another too-close HYDRA soldier collapses, brains splattering from another of Natasha's bullets.

As Steve regains balance, Barnes attacks, not knowing if he's going to kill Steve, or if he's going to try to capture him, or if he's only going to try to survive him.

 _Kill him, Buck. Promise_.

Barnes slashes with the knife; Steve deflects it with his unbroken arm, catching Barnes' hand in the process. That's good, because it leaves Steve defenseless against Barnes' left fist. That fist sails toward Steve's bloody face.

Steve forgets about that broken arm and tries to catch Barnes' fist with it. Agony ripples across Steve's face, a shriek locked down in his throat, a moment before Barnes' fist breaks his cheekbone.

Steve's one eye has already swollen shut. A lot like the helicarrier.

Same face.

Same person.

The hilt of Barnes' own knife slams into his nose, propelled there by Steve. Seeing gold stars flash and stroll through his vision, he lets himself be walked back two, three, four steps, and lets himself be bashed once, twice, three times into a decrepit support column.

"James!"

He can die here and let his Steve live with that, or he can kill this one and live with it. For Steve, he has to.

Barnes dodges Steve's next punch, then throws the entirety of his weight into Steve's stomach: propelling them both backwards, backwards, backwards, and then straight through the eroded concrete wall.

Together, they land on the grassy ground near the playground: Barnes on top and way too damn close to whatever surprises Steve has, like a knife or a flashbang or who knows.

Barnes springs away, hand reaching for the SIG Sauer that's no longer in his SOB holster.

It's the one in Steve's hand.

 _Son of a bitch_.

As Steve stands, something like a smile crosses Steve's face. Something like victory.

What an idiot.

Barnes takes out a flashbang, quickly activates it, and tosses it in Steve's general direction. Steve shields his eyes with his gun-wielding arm, losing precious time that Barnes spends running toward Steve.

The flashbang flashes and bangs.

Barnes slides under Steve and comes up behind him, quickly looping his left arm around Steve's neck. Steve jabs his unbroken elbow into Barnes' stomach several brutal times, energy waning with every thrust and every lost bit of oxygen.

With his right hand, Barnes seizes Steve's hand and forcibly twists the sidearm out of it. Panicked, Steve tries to flip over Barnes' head, but only manages to walk them backward into the dilapidated slide.

It's actually effective.

The backs of Barnes' knees hit the frame, and he teeters before his knees bend under Steve's chaotic, desperate weight. He falls through the opening where the metal slide should be, landing hard on his ass, Steve on top of him.

The advantage he has is the SIG Sauer, and he has a good shot at Steve's back, a kidney, and liver. Finger on the trigger, he readies to shoot.

Only: Steve goes limp. Absolutely limp. His arms lose strength, and his legs become spaghetti, while all of his 200-whatever pounds of weight sink against Barnes.

As Steve folds down, Barnes is able to see beyond his body: Natasha, framed by waning sunlight, holding a sidearm that doesn't look like anything he recognizes.

With hard eyes, Natasha pulls the trigger again and then once more – depositing an eight-pronged, silver drug star into Steve's arm and another into Steve's neck.

Those eyes flick to Barnes, somewhat apologetic but mostly not. "You're welcome. Let's go."

More important than SHIELD reverse-engineering and equipping HYDRA's favorite drug-gun for their own use, more important than anything at all today…

They have Steve.

***

At Mach 3, it's less than two hours from Latvia to New York – but on top of the two hours it'd taken to return to the jet and request clearance to bring the other Steve home.

Left hand loose around the flight controls, Barnes wipes a fresh bead of blood from his broken nose. In the sealed cargo hold, Natasha's alone with Rogers – she wants him to call this one "Rogers."

Live surveillance of the cargo hold shows Natasha in a jump seat, her drug gun at the ready. Meanwhile,  _Rogers_ lays on the metal-grated floor: limp, drooling, and completely out of it. If SHIELD's drugs are anything like HYDRA's, it should be days, before Rogers is anywhere near lucid.

 _We have you_.

This means that SHIELD has all of them: the other Barnes, the other Nat, the other Sam buried, and potentially the other Fury. Now Rogers, but alive.

Now, they can get Rogers help, get him back to himself, while they focus on stopping HYDRA from doing it again.

Most importantly of all:  _we have you_.

It doesn't matter that they'll have two of him.

It doesn't matter what this one has done.

It only matters that they  _have him_ : he'll be safe, he'll be home, and he'll be back with his family.

"Control, Quinjet Eight, you are cleared to land on Emergency Deck 2," someone from the Flight Deck radios. "Fly heading 72 degrees. Read back."

Emergency Deck 2 is a lit square of land between the forest and the base – for when they don't want whatever's on a jet to come near the base, until Security's gotten a chance to look things over.

Barnes reads back the landing instructions, and that person from the Flight Deck happily chirps back, "That is correct. See you soon, Quinjet Eight."

Nothing from Steve or Maria. That's good, because Steve's going to be pissed that the other him is alive – Barnes checks the live surveillance to make sure – and not killed dead. Super.

Barnes reduces speed to under Mach-1, Long Island below hidden by reams of nighttime clouds. Base is only a few miles north, and he reduces speed as he banks the jet toward home.

They have Rogers. He's not going to be okay; it's going to be a long, long, hard and painful way back; but  _they have him_.

Barnes sticks the landing on Emergency Deck 2, putting the jet down dead center between the landing lights. As he powers down the systems, he locks the flight controls out from anyone without the access code, then opens the security door between the cockpit and the cargo hold.

Already standing, drug gun out and aimed, Natasha takes a nearly invisible breath and momentary regards him. "Hey. He hasn't moved."

Barnes nods, purposely silent, and watches Rogers' chest to make sure he's breathing. He is. His eyelids don't flutter, and his face doesn't tense or twitch; his fingers are limp and half-curled, broken arm set and wrapped by Natasha.

It's been nearly five hours – and Barnes again thinks to wonder if SHIELD's drug cocktail was made to be as potent and effective as HYDRA's.

The ramp lurches, then begins a slow hydraulic descent to the ground. Outside, a twelve-person Security team plus their Steve stand waiting, real weapons out and ready.

The look Steve gives Barnes—not Natasha, only Barnes—is murder.

That's nice; he matches Rogers now. See? They have two of him.

Also, Barnes wants to but can't say,  _I didn't even do it! It was her!_

As true as it is, the other truth of it is:  _we have him, he's here, and I'm happy_   _for that_.

A gurney materializes from somewhere. Barnes stands near the cockpit, as the Security team loads Rogers on top of it and straps him in using regular, protective straps. A super serumed  _sneeze_  could break those straps.

Natasha stays close to Rogers, while their Steve stands outside the jet, slowly shaking his head. This is going to suck for him, Barnes just now realizes.

"The intelligence benefits alone…" Natasha tries. It's true. "He's seen everything they're doing."

Steve gives her some sort of look but only manages to look sick to his stomach. "You think he'll talk. How cute."

Natasha gives Steve a deserved dirty look and joins the Security team.

As the gurney rolls out, and as Barnes slowly follows it out of the jet, Steve's look turns back to murder – pointedly, at Barnes.

What Steve's saying with that look is,  _He stabbed Natasha. He blew up the hangar. He killed our people. He did all that to the other you._

Barnes lifts and eyebrow and makes a "whatever" face, silently telling Steve,  _I shot Natasha, tried to kill Sam, killed your people, beat the fuck out of you, killed Tony's parents, and, oh, tried to kill millions. You keep me around_.

The murder look doesn't entirely go away, but Steve adds something like an eyeroll to it.  _It's different, and you fucking know it._

No. Not really.

Barnes can't wait for Rogers to be out of earshot, so he and Steve can have this amazingly fun conversation with real words.

For now, Steve breaths heavily, angrily, and shakes his head at Barnes. Next, he'll wag an index finger or something equally as stern.

A ripping sound comes from the gurney. Weapons  _clack_. Three distinct voices groan, while two others scream.

Natasha shouts, "Rogers! Stand do—"

_Smack-Crunch! Thud._

He punched her. Rogers punched her.

Barnes doesn't think before yelling, "Natasha!"

Side by side with Steve, he darts her way, but only in time to run straight into the path of a live flashbang grenade.

Flash!

Bang!

That grenade takes out the other half of the Security team. He and Natasha had completely disarmed Rogers; Rogers must have stolen the grenade from one of their soldiers.

Barnes slides to the ground, where Natasha is laying, only to have his head figuratively snapped off by her: "What are you doing? Go after him!"

Barnes twists around and launches into a sprint, instantly zeroed in on the retreating, shadowed back that could only belong to Steve or Rogers. It's not Steve.

He hears the rhythmic  _thuds_  of both of their footsteps, the frantic kind that belong to a person who's terrified. Rogers, terrified to be captured by who he thinks is the enemy. Barnes, terrified for Rogers to willingly go back to HYDRA.

_Don't. Fucking don't. Please don't._

On a good day for Steve and an after-HYDRA day for Barnes, Steve is faster than him. On a bad day for Steve and an after-HYDRA day for Barnes, it's probably going to be a toss-up.

The shadowed figure doesn't gain distance from Barnes; likewise, Barnes doesn't gain on that figure. Even drugged with whatever watered-down shit SHIELD came up with, Rogers is still capably quick and liable to successfully escape freedom.

It's going to come down to one of them making a mistake. Maybe Rogers trips. Maybe Rogers takes a wrong turn in the forest.

Barnes won't fail, not in his own territory.

He can see the edge of the forest, where Rogers  _will_ fail.

The  _pelting_  of boots reverberates across dead grass and bits of bitty twigs and branches. Another couple sets of heavy breaths mix with his own: he hears Rogers ahead, and now Steve behind Barnes and then Natasha further behind Steve.

No Sam with his wings – if he was really sick, he won't be out here.

No Tony or Rhodes – and Barnes isn't surprised, as neither are often here.

It's them and only them.

Barnes forces his legs to move faster, and then even faster. He darts over errant rocks, hops over a fallen log, and balances himself against the rough contours of the ground. He looks ahead through the splinter of trees and calculates which way Rogers is going to –

A unique whistling sound cuts a clean path through the crisp air. How to make a flying pie tin work for you  _but why no fucking pie, Steve_.

Furious, Barnes spins, ferociously bats the red-and-blue shield off course with his left arm, and keeps fucking running.

Not fast enough, not by far, not when Steve's arms wrap around him, and not when his feet lose traction off the ground.

Barnes' forehead smacks into the hard, grassy ground. It barely registers, and all he can think to say is a screeching complaint of: "You threw  _your fucking shield at me?!_ "

Steve rolls off of him, clothes and autumn grass rustling as Steve stands up.

Barnes takes Steve's outstretched hand—still  _fucking furious_ —pulls himself up, and then steps deep, real deep, into Steve's space. "What the fuck's wrong with you!? He's—"

Barnes waves a hand at the dark forest, sees Natasha's lonely figure rocketing after someone she'll never catch, and knows: no chance.

There'd never been a chance.

In the moonlight, Steve looks less than guilty. Resigned, maybe. Scared. Won't meet Barnes' eyes. "Buck. He thinks you…"

The way Steve says it says everything.

The way red, ashamed heat colors Steve's face says more.

Mouth hanging open, eyebrows sewn together, stingers driving into his eyes – Barnes loses his breath and damn near his shit.

Steve knowing that means that…

After all this time, Barnes had never known, or caught on, or suspected that they'd – violated Steve that way, like that.

After Krausberg, they'd only done it to Barnes once, and he's pretty sure Eunice got herself killed for it. They'd never used  _that_ as a way to –

"It would've only got worse for him." As composed as Barnes has seen, Steve meets Barnes' eyes, strong and resolute. "What do you think he did to the other you? No matter what's left, there's no way back."

Kindly gentle, Steve adds, "You know better."

 _So we just let him go?_ crawls up his throat but dies a quick, impotent death on his heavy tongue. The only answers to that question are:  _you should've killed him_  and  _you promised._

"Did  _you_?" fights its way out of Barnes' mouth.

"Do it to a prisoner wearing your face?" Steve clarifies, absolute steel as he confronts this. "No. But I know the hate. Do him a favor next time. Don't save him."

Natasha trots up next to them, breaths coming hard as she shakes her head: the other Steve is long gone, running back to the only home that feels safe. Barnes remembers that.

Steve nods a silent  _good_ , then turns and starts the short walk to collect his shield, then back to base. Barnes lets  _him_  go, too, though knows they need to get going: the base has to be on lockdown, and Steve has no way to prove he's – well, him and not  _him_.

"What?" Natasha asks. "Why did you stop? What'd I miss?"

The world bottoming out. His brain short-circuiting around  _how can you stand to look at me_. HYDRA incinerating everything they can possibly touch, over and over again.

 _Steve_. They did  _that_  to  _Steve_.

"I need you tonight," he tells Natasha, even coolness betraying every bit of shame, heat, and vicious rage coursing through him. He  _will_ beg her, this time. "Please."

July doesn't matter. What the other Natasha did doesn't matter. All they have is what they have right here.

Natasha's gaze flicks from him to Steve and back again, confusion written all over her face, but she eventually nods.

It's not damn near good enough, and he's only happy when she returns his unannounced, self-serving hug.

A mosquito hums in his ear. The infinite murmur of crickets and cicadas surround them. Fireflies enjoying the last dregs of a warm autumn night light up the night air. Above, Orion shines, faint dots waiting for their imaginary line to be drawn.

Life moves forward, all of its beauty collateral damage.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 14: The Whispering Days._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	14. The Whispering Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's only been two days, since the mission to the forest by the sea. Since Steve dropped a long-held nuclear bomb and saved Barnes from either re-traumatizing Rogers, ending up like the guy down in the morgue, or, most likely, ending this nightmare.
> 
> As the saccharine idea of revenge sinks anchors into Barnes' bones, the team enjoys the calm before the unseen storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: vague discussion of non-con between main characters. Major character death. NFL fanfic.

Barnes pushed himself to his knees and was taken by a sudden cold sensation—like cold sweat, pinpricks through his body. He twisted around and fell on his ass and hands, just in time to throw his hands up, drop flat on his back, and wrap his hands around Steve's right wrist.

"Will it feel good? Will you like it?"

Steve's eyes welled with tears, and he said the words like they were made of broken glass. Barnes didn't understand what Steve was talking about, but he  _did_ understand that there was a very sharp combat knife about three inches from his face.

 _Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap_.

Barnes blinks out of the memory—a memory about  _his_ Steve, the one tapping at the door. Barnes glances at his wrist and sees it's barely past 0230: Steve's reeling from a nightmare again, and Steve's at Barnes' door to talk again.

Barnes doesn't move a muscle. Besides Natasha sleeping against his right shoulder, that's not a door he's ready to open, not right now.

 _Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap_.

 _Talk to Sam_ , Barnes thinks, part-angry, part-desperate.  _Go talk to your fucking girlfriend_.  _Go to Naceri. Go to anyone but me_.

It's only been two days, since the mission to the forest by the sea. Since Steve dropped a long-held nuclear bomb and saved Barnes from either re-traumatizing Rogers, ending up like the poor fucker down in the morgue, or, most likely,  _ending_ this nightmare.

 _Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap_.

"Answer it," Natasha mumbles, then wipes a line of nope-not-drool on his shirt. "He won't go away."

"Shh," Barnes hisses, as quiet as can be. "He'll hear you."

A hopeful-sounding "Buck?" slips through the steel of the door.

Natasha readjusts and ends up sticking her head on his thigh, her feet dangling off the edge of the sofa. On the TV, another episode of  _Doctor Who_  – from a season he hates – begins to play, volume off. He switches it over to  _ER_.

"It was totally a TARDIS," she mentions, half-asleep. "Dumb show."

Barnes dares whisper his retort of "we're never getting back together," as he dips his fingers into her hair and plays with the strands.

In the hallway, Steve's distinct walking pattern trails away, taking with it the pattering of Steve's heartbeat and rhythm of his breaths. Regret blends with relief into a feeling Barnes doesn't want to understand.

Tomorrow, Barnes tells himself. He'll talk to Steve tomorrow.

Until then, he thinks of the room under Death Valley, of Steve—his Steve, this Steve—and the hate, the fear, the desperation. He remembers:

"Does it feel good?" Steve hissed, breath sickly hot against Barnes' neck. The knife twisted again. "Do you like it?"

Hindsight being what it is: how the hell did he miss it for so long?

He thinks of Brock Rumlow, somehow alive, and lets the saccharine idea of revenge sink anchors into his bones.

_I'm going to kill you. I'm going to fucking kill you._

***

That morning, Natasha already up and long gone to a briefing, Barnes stares into the open refrigerator. Nothing looks remotely interesting to either eat or cook, while his stomach at once tells him that he's hungry but not hungry.

He closes the door.

The magnetic letters on the stainless steel door have been rearranged by Sharon to spell "SHITPOUCH," next to a hand-scrawled note that reads, "I wasn't really sick but glad to see you two talking again."

All the amusing thoughts of revenge and payback for Sharon's meddling evaporated the other night. Whatever he ever had planned for Sharon—which was nothing, for the record—is so inconsequential.

But he adds to her note with:  _talk to Steve_. It's not meant to be a tit-for-tat. It's a genuine plea for her to talk to Steve: to give Steve that piece of solace.

His smartwatch chirps a reminder at him: 15 minutes until Naceri.

He forgets to take her coffee.

He forgets how to talk, too, while his eyes forget how to move away from the watercolor brain.

Naceri taps the eraser-end of her pencil against her clipboard. "What's going on?"

"Steve told me something." Barnes flicks his eyes to her. "I can't tell you. He needs to tell you."

Naceri nods and scribbles, taking longer to respond than usual. He thinks she's weighing the ethics of the situation: how much to ask, how much to let go, how to adequately care for them both. Thing is: they're a walking conflict.

There's a solution for that. "Have Tony hire someone else, and I'll switch counselors."

"Stop trying to co-counsel," Naceri admonishes, not wrongly. "How will what he told you set you back?"

That's a decent question.

"I don't know. I'm still…" Barnes shrugs, trying to find a way to say it. "…trying to figure it out."

"And how's your friendship with Steve?"

That earns another shrug and another "I don't know."

Naceri doesn't hide a flash of skepticism quickly enough.

"Honestly," he adds, then realizes: "We'll be fine. We always seem to find a way. I wish he would have told me months ago."

"Why's that?"

Barnes quietly sighs, translating a restless "off" feeling into understanding that he doesn't have this in him today. Today would be a great day to spend with a book or out by the pond – not in here, not talking, and not dealing.

He musters through the remaining forty-five minutes, trying to give  _himself_ answers but settling for a lot of "I don't knows."

At the end, Naceri asks, "Should I be worried about you?"

He's not leaving. He's not quitting. He's not tearing off to kill a guy who's already supposed to be dead.

The honest answer to that is, "No. Just not feeling it today."

"Okay," she relents, though her energy tells him that she doesn't believe him. "See you Monday."

Relieved and ready to leave, Barnes doesn't waste time leaving her office. It's when he turns left to head toward the stairwell that his heart drops to his stomach.

Steve's four feet away from him.

Barnes doesn't have time to tense, to suck in a breath and try to excuse and lie his way out of talking to him, to do anything.

And Steve? Steve was fucking  _waiting for him_.

"I told you to stop you, to make you understand." Steve's eyes are sharp, tone sharper. "I  _didn't_ tell you all this time – because of this. I'm not God damn losing you again."

Everything about Steve is sharp enough to deflate Barnes flat, and he shows it by sagging against the wall and knocking his head against it.

Naceri rolls out of her office, startled to see them. Incidentally, both Steve and Barnes give her a similar pleading look:  _ignore us and go away_. Her eyebrows pop up, but she kindly moves along, not a word spared to either of them.

"Buck."

"You should've told me," Barnes says – not to chastise, or to guilt, but to lament…how he's handled some shit. "I mean,  _Brazil_."

 _Shit makes sense_ now.

Calm and resolved, exactly like the other night, Steve doesn't give Barnes an inch of give. "You never would've come back. You wouldn't be here now. That's why HYDRA did it. It's what they want."

He knows that. Doesn't need Steve to explain HYDRA to him. "Tell Naceri."

Earnest and genuine, Steve replies, "I already did. She had me do the trauma narrative."

In July, the day before that horrendous failure of a mission, he'd told Steve off for refusing therapy. Somewhere in between then and now, Steve's embraced it, found solace in it, while Barnes has hidden from most everything too ugly to face.

Amazed, Barnes comments, " _Really_."

That reaction earns a smile and a breathy laugh; it's something wonderful that turns to something terrible. "Have you told her about Krausberg?"

The way Steve says it, coupled with how and when he says it, tells Barnes that Steve _knows_. Hasn't guessed. Hasn't put some clues together into a "maybe."

"Dugan?" Barnes wonders. Someone had to have told Steve, and Dugan was the only one who'd known, or so Bucky thought.

Steve shakes his head. "HYDRA."

Steve's voice dips down low, either because he's upset, or because they're standing in a fucking hallway in the middle of Medical. "You did what the guard wanted, to stay alive for me, thinking I was back home."

Barnes' stomach goes queasy. His throat goes tight. His cheeks go prickly hot. His hand goes to the locked handle to the door of Naceri's office, and he breaks it so he has somewhere private to escape into.

Steve follows him inside, closes the door behind them, and leans against it, to keep it closed.

Knees weak, Barnes sits in his customary chair—his back to Steve—and looks at the watercolor brain.

He hates the fucking watercolor brain.

Steve continues the story. "When I came, it'd all been for nothing."

Barnes' heart palpitates so quickly it sucks the air from his lungs. Meanwhile, his eyes well, and the fingernails of his right hand dig into his palm.

"You were mad at me. Your world was gone, but I got mine. And that's why they did it to me – so I would know. So I'd 'get mine.' And hate you for it."

The loose door handle jiggles, and the door creaks as someone—Naceri, most likely—tries to open it against Steve's bulk.

"We're in here," Steve announces, as if it's environmental services trying to clean an occupied restroom, rather than Naceri appropriately trying to reclaim her office.

Every bit of what Steve described, except for the last part, is true. He's not surprised they used it – but  _like that_.

As even and controlled as he can pretend to be, Barnes says, "I never hated you. I never wanted you to – 'get yours.'"

He could choke on those words:  _get yours._

"I know that" Steve is quick to argue. "I'm telling you – because – what if you'd killed me, on the helicarrier?"

Barnes closes his eyes and would now like Steve to go away. When he sleeps, that's one of a handful of rotating, repeating dreams, and Steve  _fucking knows it_. Each time, he wakes up wanting to die, before remembering how it actually ended.

"What would you have done?" Steve presses.

Lived until around November, December 2014, then remembered most of everything important, and then very quickly killed himself. No question.

"You know," Barnes replies, tone intentionally sharp: a warning shot, telling Steve  _I get the comparison_ and  _back off_.

The handle rattles again. "Hey there, boys," Natasha drones through the steel, all cool and tempting. "Feel like coming out?"

_Yes._

Steve doesn't budge an inch but double downs by matching Barnes' tone. "So, you bring him here. And thought  _what_. You could save him? Fix him?" The tone dissolves to unfettered, grief-stricken emotion – pretty fucking rare from Steve. "I'm barely above water, and I made it out. I didn't do  _any of that_ to you."

 _I get it_ would be fair, measured, adult. Often, Barnes is none of those things.

Barnes rises so quickly that the chair falls backward, clattering against the floor, as Barnes charges toward Steve. "You don't know that he did! You would  _never_!"

Do that.

_Will it feel good. Will you like it._

A sprinkle of fear dries Steve's eyes, as Steve tries to melt backwards into the door. Good.

As vehement, though a pretentious notch or two cooler, Barnes adds, "You don't know. So, maybe, I'll go find him, and I'll fucking ask."

"Um…" echoes from the other side of the door. Sounds like Sam. "I'd probably leave them be and find a new office. But that's me."

As Barnes stares into Steve's eyes, he observes a clear flicker of fear, an ember liable to erupt into a fiery blaze. If Barnes thought for one second it was fear of  _him_ , he'd relent. It's not that: it's fear that Barnes will seek Rogers out.

Whisper quiet, Steve implores, "He hates you. He  _hates_  you. Stop."

It's fear of loss.

Barnes wraps a warm, right hand around the back of Steve's neck and pulls him into a hug. As Steve's arms wrap in hesitant reciprocation, Barnes gripes, "Stop tapping at my door at 02."

Steve doesn't laugh. "I killed you. You think he—"

That sentence doesn't get finished, but Barnes fills in the blanks: Kozerska, Berlin, the Cosmodrome, Canada, and now Latvia. Rogers isn't fucking around.

Barnes  _has_  been fucking around. Has lost the clarity of 2016, when he wouldn't have hesitated to end Rogers, wouldn't have cried about sparing Rogers a prisoner's life with HYDRA.

Steve's right: Barnes knows better.

"Still here," Barnes replies, then backs out of the embrace with a squeeze of each of Steve's arms. "I'm not going anywhere."

Poised to protest, Steve opens his mouth.

Barnes cuts him off. "I'll put a bullet in his head. And we'll bury him, all of'em, down by the pond."

It's a nice, naïve thought, one that Steve buys with a relieved sigh.

That's great for Steve.

The next mission, or the one after that, or the one after that one, won't be about recon. It'll be about one thing: the assassination of a pawn.

***

Or not.

Maria opens their three-person meeting with, "You're semi-grounded."

Steve averts his eyes and prepares for a storm.

Bucky won't care that Steve had nothing to do with it.

Bucky won't take the time to listen.

It'll be another mess.

Bucky leans back in his chair, dragging his eyes over Steve first, then over to Maria. "I'm actually pretty centered."

Steve dares to glance at Maria and notes the slight twitch of her lips, tautness along her jaw. She's trying not to laugh. Once, Tony'd (badly) joked that he didn't know how HYDRA'd managed to put up with Bucky for so long.

Maria continues. "Until we shut this down, you're critical missions only."

Bucky's protective humor fades into expected, open contentiousness. "What'd you all expect? Finders keepers? That they'd back off?"

Something like that.

Steve's happy to let Maria handle this, and so that's what he does: uselessly sits at the table, silently willing Bucky to shut up and let it go.

Until Bucky pins him with a deathly stare. "Is this you?"

"They captured you in July," Maria interjects, her tone not as pointed or severe as it could be. "They're waiting for you, each time you go out.  _Only_  you. Critical missions only. Pick up shifts in Ops."

Bucky never looks away from Steve. Doesn't raise an eyebrow. Doesn't say a word. Only stares.

"Agent," Maria prods, apparently attempting to break up a fight that is but isn't happening. "Barnes. It's done."

Bucky ignores her completely.

Just as Bucky wants, Steve cracks. "You're worth more than missions. Is it so bad?"

Composed and ever-cool, Bucky expertly evades that line of discussion. "They're never going to stop, and you'll never get rid of them, so." He finally looks to Maria. "You said we're done? Email me the schedule."

Bucky at least waits for Maria to nod approval, before getting up and leaving: nothing slammed, nothing dented, nothing overtly angry.

Maria flips shut her tablet case and blows out a breath. "That went better than we thought."

Only because Maria doesn't know Bucky. "He's pissed."

All business, Maria replies, "Better than captured. The last thing we need is him back on their side. Where are you on the Sokovia mission plan?"

_Oh, and you care._

Chilled, angry, and inexplicably betrayed by that, Steve swipes the Sokovia mission file to her and counts down the hours until he's off.

***

Not that Steve's day gets  _any damned better_ after he's off, not when he runs into Bucky on Six, near the Cafeteria.

As usual, Bucky's dodging the dinner crowd by collecting a few sandwiches early. When he sees Steve, he audibly sighs, jaw visually clenching. But he walks straight passed Steve, on toward the stairwell, without either a kind word or a shitty one.

Steve can't win for losing. Whatever the hell that saying means.

Resigned and tired of the back-and-forth, Steve acquiesces with "just say it."

"Nope."

"Say it," Steve demands, irritation ticking up. "Stop running."

Well, that does it.

Bucky stops and regards Steve, half-turned to face him. " _Me_?"

That's not an argument Bucky would ever win. Bucky runs and hides: to random women  _and_ men, to alcohol, to work, to missions, to anywhere in the world. Bucky hasn't changed as much as Bucky thinks he has: he just doesn't have the same available escape options.

"So," Bucky's corrosive tone easily warns Steve about what's to come, "your argument is that letting him go makes it safer for me, but now it's so  _unsafe_ , that I'm stuck here."

Full-on annoyed, Steve argues, "It wasn't me. Maria—"

Hands in pockets, Bucky turns full around to face Steve, more resigned than angry. "We had his weapons. We had his portal tech. He was drugged. We had him, dead to fucking rights.  _You_ didn't want him here.  _You're_ running."

Steve thinks back to that dark night, feels the dread and fear coil around him again, and considers all the ways it could have ended.

A knife through the back and three bullets to the chest. A broken beer bottle. A block of ceramic knives. A bullet to the head in a hotel room in Brazil. A broken arm. A cracked skull, hair and blood drying on stucco. Everything Steve, himself, imagined, thought about doing, or  _actually did_.

It only takes one good punch. One lucky break. One desperate attempt that kills Bucky and ends the world.

"And you promised," Steve retorts, resolved to show none of that fear, none of that dread, not ever again.

Bucky shrugs, insolent, something acidic and biting on the tip of his tongue. Before he says whatever it is, an eyebrow twitches up. "I was going to. Natasha drugged him."

Interesting story. Steve pokes the proverbial wasp nest, unapologetically. "Natasha said you lost that fight."

Almost comically, Bucky's eyes still, offense clear in his expression. "I. Did. Not."

Steve pokes some more, intentionally getting Bucky anywhere  _but_ on the original topic. It's easy. "He broke your nose."

"I broke his arm."

"That's all?" Steve jabs, meaning to wind Bucky up.

It's too much. Bucky catches on with an exasperated eye roll, then a "whatever," and then he's gone, the stairwell door  _clanging_ shut behind him.

That's okay. Bucky can be pissed all he wants, but he'll be pissed here, safely.

It's all that matters.

And Steve? Trudges to his dark room and sinks into his couch, happy that today can't get any worse.

***

Strings and clumps of melted mozzarella dry cold onto the greasy cardboard of a pizza box. An array of empty beer bottles rest on the floor. Sam discreetly unbuttons his jeans and dreads the week of killer runs with Steve it'll take to get back into Avengers shape.

This is Barnes' plan: feed Sam to death with junk food. No kicking required.

Sam opens another beer and figures there are worse ways to go. And, also, if speed-walking with Barnes, who runs absolutely God damn  _nowhere_ , would be as efficient as running after Steve.

"I'm fucking grounded," Barnes whines for the millionth time. He's not even  _drunk_.

"Dude. Like. Take a fucking vacation."

That's the best Sam's alcohol-sodden brain can do.

And the best Barnes' regular brain can do is: "It's fucking stupid. Steve's fucking stupid."

Before Sam knows it, he's drunk two-thirds of his fresh, new beer. Maybe that's why he's fearless and replies, "Is it  _really_ so bad that the other Steve won't have a chance to beat and kill your stupid ass?"

With that said: Sam thinks about rolling over the back of the sofa and taking extreme cover. Maybe Army crawling across the floor and somersaulting out the door. He figures he's too drunk for that and can't remember where he put his wings, so, he's fucked.

Except, these days, Barnes is more pedantic than threatening. "Steve didn't kill him. He killed himself. Keep up."

Sam snorts beer through his nose, not on purpose. As he coughs it out of his lungs and clears it out of his sinuses, Barnes rolls his eyes, slinks down, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and locks his eyes on the TV.

"Sure. Why not let Steve beat your stupid ass to the point where you want to kill yourself. Sounds great."

Head shaking, Barnes snipes, "I don't like you."

With that said, Sam turns up the TV's volume and completely ignores the Winter fucking Diva.

Or, at least, he tries.

"We'll fix it this time, without the machine," Barnes says, as creepy as anything else he's ever said out of the blue like that.

At least it's not in Russian?

Sam sucks in a preparatory breath and dares to look over at Barnes. Who isn't breathing. Whose eyes are distantly locked on some random point on the floor near Sam's feet. Whose eyebrows are knotted together, mouth ajar.

Seriously: Sam's wings are downstairs in the gear-up room, and he  _probably could_ make a good run for the door.

"B?"

It's been a long, long while since Barnes got lost in a bad memory, at least out of the blue like this. Sam can't possibly imagine what's left for him to remember.

"I gotta go."

And that's what Barnes does. Sam doesn't try to stop him.

***

A text from Sam pops up on Natasha's smartwatch, exactly two seconds before James pounds on her door:  _"B's freaking OUT >:O"_

The emoji's a nice touch. Descriptive.

She doesn't have the time to ask "about what?" She figures it's about getting grounded.

 

Steeled, Natasha opens the door, ready to tell James to  _calm down_ ,  _deal with it_ , and  _go away until you've done those two things_.

The very second the door opens, James blurts, "They're using the helix to reverse time on people."

Natasha blinks. Steps aside. Lets him fold onto her sofa, head in his hands, chest heaving out panicked breaths.

Natasha shuts the door and leans her body against it, letting him have his melt down. Otherwise: that's a strong statement out of complete nowhere.

She knows better than to discount his hunches. He was valuable to HYDRA for several reasons, and not in least because of his ability to connect vague dots into accurate, far-flung conclusions.

"Do better," she advises.

"She told me. Said they had a machine, and, if they used it, I wouldn't remember her. Said they could fix whatever I did to myself."

That's weak. Natasha prepares to tell him that.

"She didn't want them to use it to get… _him_ back." 'Him' being the Winter Soldier, Natasha presumes. "Because I wouldn't remember her. It would have been  _decades_ , Nat. They could never go back that far, and they'd kill me, if they tried."

It sounds like the other her had been confused, desperate, and long gone. Natasha's more than glad she's dead.

And it sounds like James is spiraling, too worked up to clearly, objectively think. But: she thinks he's talking about HYDRA's memory-repression machine, the one they'd used on him for years - the one he thinks they can't use on him again, because he's "end-of-life."

James looks at her, eyes a light tinge of upset red. "Why didn't Steve kill him? Why do all that and not kill him?"

Natasha intentionally breaks eye contact, thinking back to that terrible day in Spain and the three months after. She hadn't been able to answer that question then, let alone now.

Why effectively cripple him. Why damage his brain. Why keep him alive after. Why do it at all.

She's certain: they'd done it to break Rogers, not the other Barnes. But then…

James sucks in an audible breath. "He was useless. Why keep him around? Why all this effort to get me?"

For the other her. For Rogers, still. For who knows. Who knows why HYDRA does anything HYDRA does. Who knows why the other her did what she did, beyond austere survival in a world Natasha herself is petrified to rejoin.

"It's a stretch," Natasha argues, neither gentle nor harsh. Factual. "You know that."

His head shakes. "Rumlow's alive. He was dead."

More loose conjecture, based on what amounts to nearly  _nothing._ "James—"

"Did you read Rhodes' AAR for Kozerska?"

James is sitting up now, hands in his lap, eyes redder. Natasha leans deeper against the door, squares her stance, and resists the urge to bite the inside of her cheek.

She'd read it, including the part where James got himself killed and then – Looped back to life. Even better: she'd heard the story straight from Rhodes' mouth.

So. It's possible. What James is talking about is possible.

She wonders.

Knowing better than to ask, than to encourage him, Natasha can't help herself. "Did Rogers have a scar under his chin?"

From where she'd stabbed him, during the base attack. At the Cosmodrome, in Canada, in Latvia – James would have seen a wound or a scar.

James shakes his head "no," definitively. "Blood on his shirt. No stab wound, no scar. He wasn't hurt. It was, what, one or two days between the base attack and him showing up there?"

Not even Steve heals that quickly. Not even Steve wouldn't have a scar.

The pieces slide into place,  _clicking_  like a pistol hammer dropping to chamber a bullet.

A numb, buzzing feeling tiptoes from her feet up through her legs, in through her chest, and up through her arms and hands. When she exhales, it feels like warm, empty vapors leaking from her throat.

It won't only be James' memories they take. It won't be anything he'll be able to reclaim or get back: he'll be a different person entirely.

They could do it to her, too – and hadn't to the other one because of her knowledge of SHIELD. But they could do it.

James knows that she's convinced.

Natasha knows he's going to ask her to kill him, and she braces herself for it – prepares a response of "you're grounded; they can't touch you here; it won't come to that."

His eyes turn down, right before he fully turns away, buries his hands in his pockets, and slouches. It's how he thinks he hides. "Don't kill me."

If that was a punch, it would've knocked her clear through the door, into the hallway, and out through the other side of the building.

"I don't want to die, before I've done good. I owe it."

His voice is thick enough to tell her that his reddening eyes have turned to more. He believes what he believes, and Natasha won't waste time arguing about treating this conclusion as an eventuality. Likewise, she won't waste time arguing that neither of their ledgers are filled with repayable debts.

Tonight, she plugs in a wax cube warmer – lemongrass – and joins him on the sofa. She picks a show, any show, to stream, to distract. She hears the faint whir of his arm and wonders if he meant to do that. Usually, it means he's upset.

Tonight, she doesn't ask, doesn't coax him into talking. She leans against his right shoulder and waits for his arm to snake around her waist.

Tonight, she doesn't ask him to kill her, should that time come again.

Tonight, they're safe, home, and here.

***

Days or weeks later, at 0600, the early morning Advanced class trickles out of the gym and into the classroom. Each of them are slow to collect their books, bags, devices, and drinks. Some of their chatter centers on how awful Barajas is at teaching them the ins-and-outs of Quinjets; others talk about the overnight snow storm; and a few others seem excited about their upcoming week of R&R.

Meanwhile, Barnes straps on an extra-padded glove on his left hand, glances at his left arm to ensure the hologram is on, and regards Alievi. She's ready for their one-on-one, already in her ready stance: loose fists up, eyes focused, feet confidently planted.

In a month, she'll be joining her own recon team, weeks ahead of the others. In two months, she'll be taking on her own class of brand new recruits, no better way to master skills than to teach them.

He attacks.

It's only hand-to-hand: no guns, no knives. Much like a dance, they move around the mat, exchanging punches, kicks, dodges, and rolls. Short bursts of diffuse pain shuffle through his forehead, but it's nothing distressing or even limiting, not against an average human.

More than sparring, he uses every opportunity to guide her: "straighten your back," "follow-through on that better," "step into it," "that was nice," "do that again," "do you see how I got you on that?"

Alievi ducks, spins, and comes up hard with a kick. She's planning on dropping to her back—he'd taught her that—and then springing back up.

Not today.

He catches her foot, twists it and her body around.

In the process of throwing her to the mat, she uses his strength against him, and, with her free leg, roundhouse kicks the fuck out of his face.

Barnes drops her, steps backwards, and bites back the urge to say "fucking  _nice_."

She springs up from the mat to her feet, knowing better than to stop and ask.

He steps it up in speed, strength, and strategy. Nowhere near maximum, nowhere near how he can spar with Natasha or theoretically even Steve, but she's still novice.

Alievi breathes, remains calm, and nicely defends against those aggressive advances.

Ready to test her, Barnes purposely shuts off the hologram, shifts the plates on his arm, and makes it sound real threatening. He goes in for the would-be kill strike.

And, god damn it, she shields her face with her arms and drops to the mat.

Fucking  _not_  nice.

He steps back, unstraps and drops the glove, and doesn't turn the hologram back on. They're done sparring—the start of a throbbing headache is building in his right temple—but he's not done with her.

"That reaction will get you killed."

It's gotten  _a lot_  of HYDRA killed.

He reaches down with his left hand, offering to help pull her to her feet. The downward motion spikes the headache, pressure building. She takes his hand without hesitation, and he makes sure it makes a sound when he pulls her up.

Barnes ignores the headache; it's typical. "You think my arm is the scariest thing you're gonna see out there?"

She shakes her head, strings of wet brown bangs stuck to her forehead. Her eyes are made of defiance, and he loves it, loves it, loves it. She isn't anywhere near the inexperienced, insecure agent he'd met back in April.

"No. It surprised me. I'll do better."

"You'd better," he answers bluntly, as his right eye annoyingly twitches. "Nice kick, by the way."

She doesn't smile. She takes everything hard, and that's another battle: combat isn't about perfection. It's messy, dirty, and survival comes from knowing how to recover from inevitable missteps.

"Have a good day," he says. "And enjoy your time off."

She shoulders her bag and heads out the door. "Yeah. Thanks."

Alievi is his favorite, because she's his living proof: people can walk out of this room, competent, capable, and still be relatively happy and still not be murderers. He's not making HYDRA operatives in this room, and this room isn't Red.

It feels good.

He glances at his watch—0703—and heads down the hall to the Cafeteria.

Halloween was barely two days ago, yet a Thanksgiving-themed paper banner already hangs in soft, loose dips across both hallway walls. A cut-out of a glittery turkey dangles in the center of the threshold, while the warm scents of apples and cinnamon waft from inside. He wonders who decorates.

Natasha intercepts him in the doorway and automatically pushes a reusable to-go cup of coffee at him. "You're late."

He swallows a gulp of coffee, its heat soothing that headache. "Class went over."

"The sun won't wait."

Of course it won't.

Side-by-side, they leave the base through the front entrance and walk into the brightening, bleach-whited winter morning, straight toward the forest.

_Crunch, crunch, crunch._

It's only very early November, but the first real snow of the year has brought nearly six inches overnight and a biting cold with the first light of the morning. Sparkling, white snow perches atop the leafless branches of the myriad trees, the vibrant yellows and oranges of autumn long gone.

The mission schedule is clear today, a rarity. Last Barnes knew, Steve kidnapped Sam for a run – something about all that pizza and beer adding up, while Sharon seemed more than happy to have a day of nothing (except the new word on the refrigerator this morning was "chucklefuck").

_Crunch, crunch, crunch._

"We don't have any ideas, do we," Barnes states, not meaning to be a damper but what the hell. "We're waiting for them to make a move."

Natasha replies with a nod and curtly said "not today."

It's a bad position to be in, especially for so long now. HYDRA could end the world or enough of it today, or tomorrow, or the day after. The Insight algorithm means: SHIELD will be first to go.

What an underwhelming revenge for Rumlow. No fun. Not personal. No pay-off. No pain. It's nice to be wanted, Barnes supposes.

"James," Natasha warns. "Not today."

She's right, and he tells her so.

_Crunch, crunch, crunch._

As they walk east, the sun rises: vanilla, again. Wispy clouds tinged a pleasant yellow-orange. A promising, bright blue sky above the golden horizon. Black, shadowed branches tipped with fresh, white snow and stubborn, dead leaves. Dozens of finches adding their voices to the gentle wind.

The trail into the forest is marked by about an inch less of snow. They find it, and take it, slow and almost aimless, though they both know they're headed to the pond.

They talk about nothing, anything: gossip, movies, trainees, how to avenge their relationship by sticking it to Sharon and Steve, places and times to escape off base for even a few hours.

He loves talking to her, hearing her, watching her. Touching her.

The pond a hundred or so meters north, Barnes catches Natasha's wrist. She lets him.

She lets him pull her toward him, her feet dragging a long path through the snow.

She lets him brush his fingers through her curly hair, even tilts her head into the touch.

He lets her wrap her fingers around the collar of his just-for-show jacket, and he lets her pull him toward her body.

Snowflakes float through the air, icy and wet against his cheeks. Flakes perch on the tip of Natasha's nose, as her eyes search his face, a dimming searchlight that ends with the uptick of her lips.

Her hands rest on his shoulders, her wet nose brushing his.

He fucking goes for it –

A mechanical hum echoes in the near distance. He catches it a hair before Natasha does; in unison, they turn to identify it.

It doesn't sound like the engines of a Quinjet or even a commercial plane. It almost sounds like…

A snowball hits him square in the back. A second later, one hits Natasha in the arm; a smattering of that snow pelts against his face.

Incredulous, Barnes checks behind them and discovers motherfucking Steve already packing another snowball together in his hands.

"Buck." Steve nods with ridiculous seriousness. "Nat."

With precise, ice cold control, Natasha's hands leave Barnes as she turns to face Steve. "Steven."

That hum grows closer and louder, then louder.

He realizes: it's Sam's wingpack –

Barnes lunges in front of Natasha, gripping her arms to pull her in and use his body to shield hers from the oncoming wave-like onslaught of snow – intentionally caused by Sam touching down at half-speed, wings extended, thrusters on full.

Slathered in thick, wet snow, another snowball pelts him in the back.

Without speaking, he and Natasha agree on a retaliatory plan of attack. In the moment, it doesn't cross his mind that they're having a  _snowball fight_.

Natasha goes straight for Steve – Steve's "oh, shit" coming through loud and clear, apparently having completely underestimated the tactical and strategic risks of ganging up on Natasha fucking Romanoff.

Barnes launches himself at Sam's feet, undercutting his legs, and never makes it to the ground. Sam blasts upward, cackling as they go.

"Get Cap, and I'll buy you pizza whenever you want for a month."

Oh: so fucking  _done_. But: "I thought you were running that off?"

"Shut up," Sam nips and tries to kick Barnes.

Simply, Barnes lets go and drops back to the ground, far enough away from Steve – who is getting his ass thoroughly pelted by snowballs by Natasha – to take the opportunity to dart through the trees, duck behind a particularly thick one, and begin silently packing small, neat snowballs into a large, neat pile.

Sam touches down hard and fast again, blowing snow at Steve like a city plow tearing down a side street. Some of it hits Natasha, and she retaliates by attacking Sam. Sam does the only right thing: pops up his wings and hides behind them.

"That's cheating," Steve points out.

"Not my fault you didn't bring your shield. I told you to."

Barnes waits for one of them to realize, and he keeps a smile all to himself when it's Natasha.

"Stop talking. Where is he?"

Steve and Sam are quiet for a moment. Barnes watches them visually search, movements panicked, while Natasha laughs.

She never laughs, not like that – not like crinkles at the corners of her eyes, not like her cheeks flushing red, not like her eyes shining.

"Jesus Christ," Sam breathes, then hides behind his wings again. "We had a deal!"

" _Really_ ," Steve complains at Sam, a split second before Barnes snipes him with a neat, small snowball. "Damn it!"

He gets Natasha, too, while he's at it.

" _James_."

They all forget about the security cameras, all hooked into JARVIS, and all hooked into the base's live security system.

In Ops, Rhodes crosses his arms and considers. "We could probably count this as a training exercise."

Maria rolls her eyes but agrees to put it on the books.

***

Barnes tips back in his chair in Ops, a tablet cradled in his left hand. The mission clock for Quinjet Six – Sharon, Alievi, and Morehead – reads 02:45:02. It's an easy in and easy out: a cakewalk mission.

Irrationally, the whole damn thing irks him. Quinjet Six is  _his_. Sharon is  _his_ partner. This is  _his_ mission.

This whole damn thing has irked him for weeks.

ATC chatter reads normal. Flight checks read normal. Everything reads normal.

He knows why Steve hates this job.

 _He_  hates this job.

On his tablet, he flips to another page: annotates a sentence, makes his own comment, tips his chair back to all fours, picks up his outdated pen, and makes a note for himself by the map he's hand-drawing. By the end of Quinjet Six's mission, he'll have their next three mapped and ready for briefing.

Quinjet Six lands, easily completes the mission without one whisper from HYDRA, and takes off again, headed back to base.

Maria comes up behind him, a hand on the back of his tipped-back chair. "Good mission plan. Good training."

Referring to Alievi and Morehead: his recruits, through and through.

"Yeah," he curtly replies, without saying  _I know._

It's enough to shut down wherever Maria was taking that.

Unlike Steve, Barnes actually  _likes_ Maria and isn't so offended by how she does the job of singularly leading a mostly-disavowed espionage organization. And, though he doubts her skin is  _anywhere_  near thin enough to take offense to him, it's not fair to be an asshole.

Years ago, he'd met her by aiming an assault rifle at her. She'd tricked him into meeting Fury and complimented his hair. Much later, she'd tried to get him to stay here, seemed upset about seeing him in 2004, and has been pretty damned supportive since.

He owes Maria – a lot. More than he thinks to remember, most days.

"Thanks," Barnes adds, before she can get too far away. "I appreciate it."

After a flicker of surprise, Maria slightly dips her head in acknowledgement, then walks back over to him.

Because of the scale of the mission, there are only three others in the room: Morlev and two analysts, all of whom are wearing headphones, focused on concluding the mission.

So, when Maria says, "The original plan was for you to be entirely grounded for a year," Barnes doesn't think anyone else hears her.

" _If_ you had ever gotten full mission clearance, to begin with," Maria adds. "Berlin was meant to be easy, to gauge your headspace and help Carter. This mess with HYDRA forced our hand."

It sounds entirely,  _entirely_ awful. He might not have stayed.

On the other hand: he's floored. The Army, the SSR, HYDRA, even Natasha and Sam back during 2016 – they all only wanted him because of his abilities in the field. That's his worth.

"I know you can tear HYDRA apart. And I know they can tear you apart. You're more valuable analyzing intelligence, formulating strategies, and training our people. Would it be so bad?"

Said no one ever.

He tells her as much. "I don't know what that would be like." And then hides behind: "What I hear you saying is that I'm easier to work with than Steve."

Maria's too poised than to ever show a reaction to that. "Think about it."

It's another defining moment in time, and he comes down from it while lying on Natasha's bed, his head in her lap. He has a great view of the white vaulted ceiling with its crown molding, while her fingernails dance over his forehead and through his hair.

She always knows how to bring him down.

" _Would_  it be so bad?" she asks.

He nods, static snapping at his too-dry hair. "Right now, it would be. I'm not running, and I'm not hiding."

Natasha makes a sound like "mmm." "Is that what you would be doing?"

He almost thinks to say  _don't fucking therapy me_ , but she's not Sam, even though she sounds like Sam. Instead, he admits, "I'm fucking terrified of HYDRA. So, yeah, that's what I'd be doing, while you're all out there."

Some days, it feels good to be scared: to have that part of his brain back. Most days, he'd be better off cutting that part of his brain out. He'd be more focused, more efficient – more.

Natasha scratches his scalp, front to back, over and over again. He rubs the underside of her knee, grounding, grounding,  _always grounding_.

"Or," she offers, nothing tentative, "you're afraid that we trust HYDRA's little helper."

Natasha's memory is  _good_. He'd called himself that once, something like two years ago in November 2016.

To hide from the burning shame in his gut, Barnes dodges with, "HYDRA's  _wonderful_ little helper. Is how I put it. So."

Natasha doesn't laugh or smile. "You're avoiding. You have Steve's shield on your arm. You've been SHIELD for over four years. We trust you.  _You_ trust you. If you want to do missions, tell her that. No one likes Ops."

Barnes closes his eyes, takes in the dark, and knows. "It's not trust. I don't know what it is. When this is over – maybe."

Maybe.

He doesn't see Natasha's smirk so much as he hears it, when she says, "You really think you're wonderful?"

He can't just let that  _go._ This time, at least, Sam and Steve won't interrupt.

***

Near the end of November, incessant banging and pounding on the door wakes Barnes from a deep, uncomfortable sleep at the ripe time of 0936.

His left arm is buried in the side of the couch; his tablet, pressing into his hip. His forehead throbs, neck aches, and left side of his chest prickles along the scar line: it's going to be a bad day.

The banging doesn't stop, but he hears Sharon's voice: "You owe me a Sunday!"

He rolls off the couch, walks half-naked to the door, and opens it, shameless. It's Sharon, and, as promised, Sam. Here for her Sunday – she'd "won" it last week, when he'd lost some stupid bet after planning her and Sam's mission to northern Moldova.

It's been weeks, since he's been out there. Funny thing about "critical missions only" is that  _none of the fucking missions are critical_.

"Good morning," Sam greets, a bright smile plastered on his dumb face.

"You need to calm the fuck down," Barnes replies.

Sharon holds up her phone, screen toward him, and wiggles it. "See this?"

He yawns, left hand over his mouth, and doesn't look at her phone. "What do you want?"

"Put your clothes on. We're getting burgers."

The phone wiggles again. Barnes pays it some mind and sees a burger. Hunger ripples through his stomach:  _breakfast_.

Sharon grins, in one of the best moods he's ever seen from her.

Barnes yawns again.

Sam lifts an eyebrow. "Did you sleep?"

One of the strike teams had gotten back from Sokovia around 2330 yesterday, but he'd stayed up to shower, eat, and then look at intel with Steve and Natasha. Those two have an easy mission together today, one Maria's handling alone in Ops. They'd abandoned him at 0200, while he'd drifted off sometime around 0730, after a couple of days without sleeping.

He's tired. Bored. Ready to rip out of his skin.

"It's a three-hour drive to Concord," Sharon mentions. "Sleep in the car, wake up, eat."

Fucking  _done_  and  _who cares_  if they going to drive three hours for breakfast-lunch.

While they wait around in the living room, Barnes throws on jeans, a t-shirt, and a dark blue pullover sweater, then quickly scrubs cream through his hair. It'll do.

As he pulls on his shoes, Sharon shows him another picture: golden waffle fries, then deep fried pickle spears, and it's a good thing he's  _probably_  at zero risk of having a heart attack.

"We could take a—"

Sharon's phone disappears, at the same moment she interrupts him. "Not taking a jet. But nice thought."

" _But_  we might have to pull over in Foxborough and exorcise Tom Brady's sweater, because,  _wow_ , you're wearing that," Sam snarks. "You finally ready, Winter Patriot?"

Barnes glares, as dangerous as one of Steve's wilting houseplants. He grabs his phone and tablet and stalks ahead of them, finally thinking to throw back, "I liked you better when you hated me."

"I liked you better then, too," Sam easily retorts.

Sharon whacks Sam in the arm.

Laying in the backseat of the car, Barnes googles an idea he'd had, surprised when the idea turns out to be feasible, and then puts his phone on the floorboard. His body is screaming at him to  _sleep_.

He closes his eyes to the sound of Sharon and Sam bickering about the best route. He falls into an oblivious sleep, and he trusts both of them without once thinking to doubt.

"—dding me?'

"So. There's this new thing called 'Google.' Maybe you've heard of it?"

Barnes opens his eyes. The car's stopped; outside the driver's side passenger window, he only sees rusted, black-gray light poles – the kind usually in big parking lots.

Sharon sighs, loud and fast. "There's also this thing called 'go fuck yourself.' Maybe you've heard of  _it_."

"Hangry much?" Sam snipes, tone drenched in good humor.

Barnes sits up and peers out the windshield: overcast sky, gray clouds, drizzles of melted snowflakes on the windshield's glass. In front of the car, a beige, brick building with a faded, red roof, and windows plastered with "FOR SALE: CALL ELLIOT REALTY 603-555-6789" signs.

Also: he's fucking starving. Fucking.  _Starving_. "Where's the food?"

Sharon sighs again, while the backs of Sam's cheeks apple up with a smile. "Closed, man."

Well, fucking  _clearly_. Barnes lays back down and flops his right hand around the floorboard for his phone. Easily located, he powers on the screen, sees it's only 1216, and makes a decision.

"That's a  _franchise_ ," Sharon complains. "There has to be something else near here—"

"Sharon - a burger's a burger."

"Get out and walk home."

"So," Barnes interjects, flat on his back, the screen of his phone reading  _purchase confirmed_. "It's an hour and a half to Foxborough; game starts at four. There's your Sunday. Also, breakfast, somewhere, now."

Two separate conversations ignite. "It's noon, and IHOP is gross."  _and_ "They're playing the  _Browns_. No one gives a shit."

"Food, any food. I already bought the tickets."

Sam twists around in his seat, suddenly serious. "You  _like_  football? Like,  _like_  like?"

Not really. Even back in the day, he'd only "liked" baseball, because he was supposed to like baseball, also known as the most fucking boring sport known to man. He just – well, going back to base sounds not great.

"Hope you like nosebleed." Because he's not going to have an entire fucking stadium roaring behind him.

"B. It's been  _years_ , and you never—"

"Red Robin it is," Sharon announces.

After a surprisingly quick stop at Red Robin, Sharon hits US-3 going nine over the speed limit, and they're on their way to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough.

***

Outside the stadium, a moment after Sam whispers "we don't have to do this," the metal detectors pick up HYDRA's experiments but not the arm; he gets through the quick pat down without any issue. The security's a lot like a joke.

Even though they're plenty early, crowds have already formed, and it only takes that much for Barnes to reconsider doing this. He's zeroed in on all the exits, but the people – his heart pulverizes against his chest.

He looks at each person, assessing them for threats, discarding the ones who clearly aren't. A doctor. A group of teachers. Factory workers with their kids. College students. A group of National Guardsmen. A former Specials operative with her wife.

Sam's hand wraps around his right bicep. "You're good. Keep moving."

"Where's Sh—"

Sharon sticks a ballcap on his head, drapes a dark blue scarf around his neck, and hands him a pair of sunglasses. She gives Sam a knit Patriots hat, like the one she's already wearing.

"No. I am  _not_  wearing that," Sam argues, then hisses, "It's— _the Patriots_."

Another group of military personnel.

Sharon replies, "Blend in, Sam."

Salesmen.

"I  _do_  blend in."

A lawyer.

"Sam."

A baker.

Down the corridors. Up the escalators, higher and higher. The crowds thin, lighter and lighter. His heart slows down. Sam's hand stays. Sharon's shoulder touches his left.

They find Section 308 and step out into the unseasonably forgiving November cold. Barnes slides on the sunglasses: the point being to look unrecognizable. The more important goal is to avoid being televised and, if televised, to not be recognized by a bunch of bored HYDRA goons.

It's only maybe 35 Fahrenheit – not bad at all, actually. Their seats are at the very, very top of the section, right by the stairs; nothing and no one will be behind them, and nothing and no one can stop them from leaving.

Sam and Sharon box him in: Sam on his left, Sharon on his right. He doesn't say anything of it.

"Great. Sniper seats," Sam complains. "Can't you leave Brady's sweater at the ticket counter and let us go home?"

Barnes is moderately sure Sam's kidding. "No."

Sam grins: this is okay.

"I just wanted a cheeseburger," Sharon laments, even as she kicks her feet up on the chair in front of her, hands tucked into her new Patriots sweatshirt. "You still owe me a Sunday."

"Bull _shit_. This is it."

Sam, also known as a traitor, suggests, "Buy us food, and we'll call it even."

Barnes rolls his eyes and pulls out a credit card. It's all SHIELD's anyway. "Here. Take it."

Sam plucks the card out of his hand and tears off back into the guts of the stadium. As he goes, Sharon pulls a small silver device out of her purse, holds down a small button, and then sticks it under her seat like it's a wad of gum.

He's never seen it before.

"Disrupts cameras. No kiss cam, CCTV, or viral videos for us."

Neat.

Sam brings back two armloads and two handfuls of food, including burgers, the most unhealthy cardboard boat of cheese nachos Barnes has ever seen in his life, hotdogs, and all the fucking beer on tap.

Sharon picks a red pepper off the top. Fake, yellow cheese oozes off of it, and, although Barnes shakes his head in disgust, he takes a drowned-in-fake-cheese chip from the boat. It's like Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium: relax, drink beer, shoot shit, wait for things to happen. It's close; real close.

He wonders if Steve would like this, or if this would completely freak him out. Something like this might be worth doing with him.

That thought leads to  _what are they doing right now_ ,  _are they okay, what if something happened_. He checks his phone, sees no notifications, and puts those thoughts down for the day.

"We have a rule," Sam starts in, "that the first person to check their phone buys the next round. You win."

Whatever. "Keep the card."

The stadium fills, a head in every seat. A ten-year-old kid and his parents (a landscaper and a writer) sit next to Sam. A group of adults sit below them, forcing Sharon to plant her feet on the ground. Waving light-up swords, excessive face paint, and an array of colors from red, white, and blue to orange and brown introduce the dull roar that gradually fills the stadium.

"So, what's going on with you and Romanoff?" Sharon asks, unashamed, out of the blue. "You don't hang in the kitchen anymore."

Not going there, even though he suspects Sharon knows. "Who?"

Sam snorts, then coughs, beer caught down the wrong pipe. Sunglasses still on, Barnes rolls his head toward Sharon and smirks, just a little tiny bit, and it feels good, just a little tiny bit.

Sharon snorts and rolls her eyes. "That's what I thought. You're welcome."

Sam recovers. "Dude, everyone knows."

"Nope" is all Barnes says.

Sharon and Sam carry the conversation, letting him bounce in and out as he pleases. It's easy and relaxed, nothing expected or demanded, exactly how he remembers the best friendships.

After a flurry of thrashing music, red and blue fireworks, white smoke, and flashing giant TV screens, the game starts. That's all a little different than the rickety baseball games in the City. The screaming, heckling fans haven't changed.

"Fucking Patriots," Sam mutters, earning Sharon's amusement. "Fucking Browns."

It's a boring game, mostly because it's obvious that the Patriots hadn't quite taken preparation for the game seriously. Sam and Sharon alternate beer runs, going through cup after cup.

"I miss getting drunk," Barnes comments.

A loose, buzzed smile on his face, Sam's glazed eyes light up. "We have a friend who can help with that; he's out of this world. Ask Steve how it works. Tony has pictures."

Thor. Barnes is starting to think the guy isn't real.

Deep into the game, during a struggling, slow, Patriots drive down to the Browns' 30, Brady gets creamed, the ball slipping out of his hand. Brown and red and orange and blue and white collide all over the drop point, while the crowd roars and boos. Two yellow flags hit the turf. Refs storm the field, whistling, waving, and hollering. It's a thirsty fucking game: a single possession making the difference, Patriots on top by a thread.

Halfway through Sam's eighth beer, Sam squeezes the sides of the plastic glass. Barnes watches Sam eye the way the beer pops up, ignoring the froth spilling over the top and sliding down the side.

"You okay?" Barnes asks.

Way, way back in the day, doing something like that would be right around the time Bucky would have one more drink and collapse in an elevator. His mom had found him like that once and never, ever let him hear the end of it, with shit like  _shikker iz der goy_  interjecting with shit like  _eşti prost de behăi_ and  _nu te duce mintea_.

Everything she'd said be damned, he still misses getting shitfaced drunk. And her.

Sam looks up. The cup crinkles back into shape, good enough for Sam to enjoy a long drink.

"Once a month, my dad and I would drive down to Charlotte, catch a home game. Make a whole weekend of it. When I hit college, I stopped making time. I was too busy. Too much going on. The last game we ever went to – October 14, 2001. They lost to the Saints, of all teams, an awful loss by  _two points_. They won  _one_  game that year. That time next year, he was gone. Man, just  _gone_."

Next to him, Sharon tenses up tight. "I'm getting more beer." And then she's up, up, away.

Listening isn't hard.

"And all I can think is what it'd be like, going to last season's games with him, when they won the whole thing. If he was still here. How much he would've loved it." Sam takes a deep, solid breath and laughs self-consciously. "Don't mean to bleed on you."

Barnes dismisses that with an easy shake of his head. "I've bled on you plenty."

Red flag on the field. Belichick doesn't much like the turnover ruling.

Sam looks at his beer again. If Sam wasn't on his left, Barnes would wrap an arm around his shoulders, no fucking problem. But Sam  _is_  on his left, and he has to do better than a metal arm around his neck.

"Mine would take us—me, my two brothers, Steve—fishing. Hunting up north, near the base, actually. He was from Indiana and never really took to Brooklyn. So, he would do things, but never say things or show things. I never really got a sense of love from him. I mean, he was fine – he cared – it just…"

It's hard to explain. Steve doesn't even get it, because Barnes' father didn't have  _nearly_ the expectations for Steve as he had for Bucky.

Barnes adds, "I never thought he cared enough, that it would matter so much to lose us. I can get into everyone else's heads, but I can't understand that. Can't reconcile the man I knew with his obituary."

He says it all quietly, hoping it all gets lost in the screaming crowd. The people around them seem oblivious, each in their own world, immersed in the game.

Sam raises his glass and tilts it Barnes' way. "To people we've lost and no damned sense."

A little drunk, a little slurred, a little bit not a real sentence, but Barnes picks up his own glass and smushes it into Sam's. "Yep."

The moment slides to a close, with Sam raising a pointed finger, blinking slowly, then tumbling into a rocky, "Okay, okay, okay, okay.  _Why_ did you start eating cheese pizza with no pepperoni or veggie burgers with no cheese. Like. Why."

Barnes chuffs out a real laugh, not sure if it's because of Sam's delivery or Barnes' own entire fucking attempt at… Yeah. "Naceri," he replies.

Sam scrunches his eyes closed and shakes his head, as if that can't possibly compute. "W-ha- _t_. And you  _listened_?"

Sam doesn't know, and Barnes doesn't want him to. "It's to do with my mom. Whatever. Don't worry about it."

The explanation only serves to confuse Sam more, and it's at that impeccable, saving-grace moment that Sharon returns with three more beers balanced in her hands.

Her body is loose, boneless, and these three are going to be the last three. "What'd I miss?" she asks.

Barnes shrugs: by the sound of the crowd, and from the scoreboard, it looks as if the Patriots lost their challenge. "I think the Browns might win."

"Oh. Cool."

The Browns don't win. They lose by a field goal.

The throngs of people shuffle out of their seats, down the aisles, and into the stadium's hallways, a bit like ants from up here. Sam and Sharon drink and eat, obliviously content to be the last ones out.

"Keys," Barnes says to Sharon.

Fingers fumbling, her eyes half-lidded, she dutifully fishes the car's FOB out of her back pocket and hands it to him. "You're a good friend. I miss playing Scrabble with you."

First, never argue with a drunk person. Second: "That's nice. C'mon."

Sharon attached to one arm and Sam to the other, Barnes leads them out of the stadium, neither of their feet quite coordinating with themselves, let alone with each other. They're both shit-faced plastered and can't hide it now that they're not sitting down.

The endless sets of escalators each present a fun adventure. He thinks about asking Rhodes or Maria to commandeer the security footage of it.

"You cuss a lot, man," Sam informs Barnes.

"Yeah, well, you drink a lot," Barnes informs Sam.

It takes way too long to cross the parking lot, navigate between the last dregs of vehicles, and find their nondescript black sedan. He happily deposits them both into the back seat; they can figure out their tangle of limp legs and arms.

He drives, while they sleep.

An hour from home, tearing down I-90 west of Holyoke, red heat fills his cheeks, and he realizes: he blew off Naceri today.

" _Fuck._ "

Maria's going to pin his ass to the wall.

Back at base, he all but carries Sam and Sharon—each on one arm again—up to Seven and doesn't have the energy to get them back into their respective apartments. He takes them both to his: drops Sharon on the couch and Sam in his bed, figuring it'll be far less awkward for Sam to wake up there than Sharon.

On his way out of  _his own damned place_ , Barnes glances at the clock—almost 0200—and thinks it's way too late to try going to Naceri's office on Four. He does it anyway, so at least he can say he tried.

Light fans onto the hallway's tile floor from her office. He loosens his shoulder and raps on the open door with his knuckles, as light as can be.

Naceri's eyes draw up; her fingers continue to type on her Mac. "It's early."

Unconsciously, Barnes bites his upper lip and pulls it through his teeth. "Did you want coffee?"

"No," she replies,  _barely_ a smile in sight.

"I'm sorry. I completely forgot—" He trails off, unsure where else to go with that. A whole bunch of inappropriate jokes cross his mind, most of them about his memory.

Her fingers stop, and she leans back from her desk, inscrutable beyond that he can tell she's not mad. "What happened?"

Basically: "I lost a bet and owed Sharon a Sunday. We went to a Patriots game in Boston."

"Foxborough," she corrects, only a little pedantic. "Nice hat. Whose idea for the game?"

"Mine," he admits.

Her eyebrows scrunch together, lips pressed thin. "You were off the base all day and all night, doing non-work-related activities?"

He picks out all of the issues: he'd been too impulsive, shouldn't have made them go, shouldn't have been around tens of thousands of people, shouldn't have been around TV cameras, shouldn't have risked tipping off HYDRA, shouldn't have been off the base for so long, and shouldn't have done  _any of that_ without people near him who could take him down. He'd risked  _everything, all of this_ , for one shitty day.

It hadn't been shitty. It'd been good.

He focuses on the easiest indiscretion to explain: "We were in the  _top_  of the stadium – no one saw us. Sharon had a – device thing."

…that they left there.

Naceri waves her hand at him, eyes closed, face screwed up in a way that looks almost like  _no, you're not getting the point_. "You did good," she says, putting a sharp point on each word. "If you have time tomorrow, stop by, and we'll talk."

A single second stretches for hours; in the space of that second, he rewinds what she'd said about a million times. "What?"

She offers him an empathetic smile. "We'll talk about the ways SHIELD can still feel like HYDRA."

He tells a lot of people—Steve, Sam, sometimes Natasha—that it doesn't. But it  _does_  in certain ways, like worrying about leaving the base without a specific purpose, without a handler, without going full-out, fall-off-the-map, vanished-in-the-night.

He shoots out a deep, audible breath. "Okay. Yeah. Good night."

"Good  _morning_ " she calls after him.

He goes back up to Seven, walks past his place, and glances at up Natasha's optic reader for access.

 _Click_.

Inside, he expects her to already be asleep – but hears slushing water coming from the bathroom.

Mounds of white bubbles fill the white tub. Natasha sits hunched inside of it, her legs and arms hidden under lavender-scented foam. Stretching her back, he assumes.

A purple, red-speckled bruise covers her right shoulder, and a red, raised gash stretches from her eyebrow to hairline. From what little of her face he can see, it's full of dark circles and deep lines.

So much for that "nothing mini-mission." It'd turned bad – but not bad enough to have called for back-up.

"Hey."

She doesn't raise up or look at him. Her voice drags. "Hey. Don't be shy."

Barnes' clothes crumple into a pile on the floor, and he slides into the warm water behind her. He runs his right hand up her back, pressing his fingers into her tight, knotted muscles.

Natasha groans, her body leaning forward even further. Her muscles stretch, tension bounding against his fingertips.

"Minunat моя," he whispers, combining Russian and Romanian to call her "my wonderful," because he can and also fuck everyone.

Natasha laughs and leans back against his chest, her head resting on his shoulder. She looks up at him. "You make that up?"

"Don't make fun. I'm proud of it."

She shakes her head, a tilt back and forth, her wet hair sticking to his skin. "I'm not.  _Du bist_ _süß._ "

"Cute or sweet?" he asks.

"I meant 'sweet,' but I guess you can be cute."

He smiles, the way only she can make him smile, and loses himself in the moment: trying to figure out how he ever thought he could survive without her. Even on a DC rooftop across from Steve's old apartment, even then, he'd  _known_ : she's one of his long-lost worlds.

"I think I lost you," Natasha says.

His forehead finds the crook of her shoulder and the warmth of her neck. His fingertips brush the smooth scar on her abdomen, moving on before she has a chance to bat his hand away. He knows better, she'll say. He doesn't give her time to say that, either.

"Never do," he replies.

She speaks in Russian. "Why do you stand swaying, slender birch tree, with your head bent to your very stem? But across the road, across a wide river, similarly lonely stands a tall oak tree. How can I, birch tree, clamber over to the oak tree? I wouldn't bend and sway as I do now. With my slender branches, I would lean against him, and with his foliage, I would whisper day and night."

"You make that up?"

Natasha makes a contradictory noise. "It's a children's lullaby."

It's totally fucking Soviet, and, god help him, it's  _endearing_.

"Love is for children. For you, I would whisper day and night."

The only response for that is  _I don't deserve you_ , and, so, he leans his forehead against her scarred back and says, "I love you anyway."

***

A string of fluffy, thick green garland hangs in soft, loose dips across both hallway walls on Six. Mistletoe dangles in the center of the threshold into the Cafeteria, while strings of symphonic Christmas music create earworms and supposed holiday cheer.

Downstairs in the foyer, a one-story tree loaded with sprinkle-colored lights and gleaming ornaments greets all those who dare enter the building. It's probably too much to ask Bruce to throw a Quinjet at it.

"Two more weeks of this?" Barnes asks, though he's damn near  _glowing_.

Sam smirks knowingly. "You're so optimistic. This shit will be up  _way_  past New Year's."

"Perfect."

"Just wait 'til Valentine's Day."

Inside the cafeteria, Sharon's already eating an obscenely early breakfast, wide awake and with her tablet in front of her.

Out of habit, Sam checks his watch: 0307. "Jesus fuck me."

Barnes pushes a steaming, white ceramic cup of coffee at him. "You volunteered."

"Regretting that. Did you even sleep?"

Barnes shakes his head, his expression saying "are you serious?" Sam's pretty sure he only sleeps maybe once a week, still trying to outrun nightmares.

"What the hell do you do all night?"

Face straight, Barnes retorts, "Masturbate. Violently."

A little bit too loud with that, the omelet cook looks up, judgment all but oozing into the eggs.

Never deterred, Barnes shamelessly adds, "With eggs. Thinking of Steve. Can I get mine with green pepper and a lot of cheese?"

As that mental picture coalesces in his head, Sam laughs and laughs all the way to Sharon's table.

"Don't want to know," Sharon says.

He sets his tray down, keeping it light with an omelet, some fruit, and that coffee. "Oh, you don't."

All business this morning, Sharon pokes at her tablet and then pinches at the screen. "Is Natasha coming today?"

"No, she's been on for too many days. I'm picking up for Morgan on Nine."

"That the guy with the broken ankle?"

Last Sam heard, the guy'd stepped into a mole hill and snapped the bone clean in half. "Yep."

Barnes finally makes it over, his tray considerably more loaded than Sam's. "It's a weird one."

It being "a weird one" is why Barnes is on for this one. Sam's happy for that, to have a powerhouse along for at least part of this ride. Judging by that glow – Barnes is pretty happy about it, too.

Worry etched on her face, Sharon looks up from her tablet. "You're spooked?"

"Wouldn't say that."

"Dude, you kinda just did," Sam argues in disbelief.

Already through the omelet and now halfway through three stacked pancakes and a second waffle—quite the carbo-load to fuel the day—Barnes makes a face. "I said it's weird. It's all been weird."

Sharon's eyeroll is all that needs to be said about that.

But where's the fun in that. "Seriously, man, I'm buying you a voice recorder for Christmas, so you can hear yourself."

Perfectly serious, with a perfectly straight face, Barnes answers, "I'm Jewish. Technically. So."

Sam hadn't known that, doesn't know if it's true, but whatever. "Fine. Early birthday present."

Barnes shrugs. "Panthers suck."

Sharon laughs out loud – loudly enough to draw attention from the three tables of flight crew and half-asleep analysts.

"Rachael Ray sucks," Sam says.

Barnes eats a bite of waffle. "Your mom sucks."

Sharon jumps in: "You both suck."

These are the people Sam calls friends.

***

Inside Ops, Steve stands still, arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits. Six and Nine just crossed the Adriatic Sea and entered Croatian airspace. Both jets are flying at maximum altitude and right below Mach 1. It's another 1,200 kilometers and another hour until the official mission begins.

It's as close to a joint mission as it gets without being a joint mission. Another one of Banner's signals came from the middle of the Black Sea, while another immediately after came from southwest of Sulina.

The plan is for Quinjets Six and Nine to fly in together, until a predetermined point over the Carpathians: Six headed for the Black Sea, and Nine toward Sulina.

The signals are odd and strange, at the best; an ambush, at the worst. The stakes being what they are, their only option is to proceed, this mission being classified as "critical."

And so Bucky's out there. Sharon's out there. Sam's out there.

Steve breathes: one, two, three  _calm_ , one, two, three  _breathe_. He hopes not to show the anxiety bounding through live wires under his skin.

He hates Ops.

The jets hug the Hungary-Serbia border, two expert pilots making it look easy. All systems are green, clear, normal. Everything's fine.

This isn't the dangerous part, he reminds himself. This isn't even the mission.

Steve keeps breathing, eyes still staring, every part of him attuned to the sounds of Ops: keyboards clacking, pages flipping, feet moving, mission-focused chatter rattling off altitudes, distances, system statuses. Tinny voices distorted by radio frequencies—Sharon's and Barajas'—mirror that chatter.

Minutes tick away on Steve's wristwatch. Fifteen. Thirty. Forty-five. Both jets fly deep into Romanian airspace, clearing Sibiu.

Five minutes from the break point, Steve gets on the comms. "Quinjet Six and Quinjet Nine, Ops. You are cleared to proceed. Give'em hell."

He bites back a "be safe out there."

At the exact pre-determined GPS coordinates, Sharon issues the command: "Six, Nine. Break."

Barajas responds affirmatively.

Six and Nine break formation: Six headed northeast, Nine southeast. Mission go.

Now, the hard part.

The Ops team is well-trained and, by now, has been through enough of these missions to know what to do. Automatically, the flight plans and real-time trajectories of both teams fill the center screen.

Steve glances past his right shoulder at Maria. She seems perfectly at ease, and he wonders if she feels any of the tensi—

A low, loud burst of static explodes in Steve's earpiece. He flinches, hand raised uselessly to his ear.

The static dissipates into broken, crumbled words. "—day. –as be—hit. Rep— may—. We ha— -en –it."

"Pull in Nine's cockpit feed, now!" Maria orders.

Nine's been hit.

The video feed from Quinjet Nine flashes onto the center screen. It's only the cockpit, the splintered windshield, and part of the controls; hands, mostly. Barajas' on the stick, and Sam's furiously working at the controls – trying to restart the engines, it looks like.

Ops bleeds away, until that screen is the only thing in the world. Steve stares unblinking, not breathing. His thoughts are stuck in a loop:  _make it, make it, make it, make it, make it_.

The world can bend. It has to bend.

"Nine, you have another bogie inbound. I repeat, Nine, you have another bogie inbound!"

Steve flicks his eyes to the radar and sees it blinking closer and closer to Nine.

Fiery hot heat fills his body and devours his muscles: adrenaline with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Closer, closer, closer.

The world bends. It has to bend.

The cockpit's windshield splinters, then shatters. A desperate scream heralds a person being sucked through the windshield's opening.

Steve can't breathe.

" _Jesus fucking…!"_

In a millisecond, a flash of orange overtakes the feed. The comm spikes, a high-pitched  _squawk!_  piercing his ear. The screen cuts to a slowly-moving "no audio/video" message.

Steve flinches. His shoulders draw up, and a hand squeezes the dip of his right collarbone. He looks at that hand and sees even, short nails and a white scar across the knuckles: Maria.

He looks back to the dark screen. Above it, the ops clock, ticking away the hours, minutes, and seconds of the mission: 02:48:03.52.

"Nine is down. Nine is confirmed down."

Nine's comm hisses static.

Maria takes over. "Abort Six, get Rhodes on the line, and deploy SAR-1 – engagement not authorized."

Steve's eyes close, and his head bows. He knows what he saw. He knows what it means. He knows what they're going to find. He knows the letter that will be sent to Sam's mother.

Two hours and forty-eight minutes ago, this didn't have to happen. Sam could have still walked back onto this base. Complained about the cafeteria food. Gone ridiculously nuts over a football game. Sat for quiet minutes and  _been._  Called his mom.

Numb, he somehow finds his legs and stands. He bumps into Maria but keeps going. He pushes the rolling chair away and makes toward the door. He doesn't feel all the sets of eyes watching him; doesn't know if anyone is behind him; and, through the buzz of white noise in his ears, doesn't know if Six is aborted, if Rhodes is on the line, and if the SAR has been deployed.

Sam is dead.

 _Sam_.

"Six is hit. Six is hit."

Steve's scalp tingles.

"Pull up the feed and confirm contact."

"Confirmed. Communication offline. Receiving distress signal."

Steve turns and locks his eyes on the radar. Six is flashing red, its altitude rapidly decreasing – it's already at 32,000, then 31,500, then 31,000, then nothing.

Six is Bucky and Sharon, and it's gone at 31,000 feet.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 15: The Devil in the Wind._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: "Falling" by Michael Kiwanuka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFLtTbzXOGo) & "Give It All" by Foals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a00CocDCed4)
> 
> A lullaby was adapted with appreciation from this website: https://blog.vickiboykis.com/2009/02/the-most-depressing-baby-songs-ever-russian-ones/
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	15. The Devil in the Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For two and a half burnt, blackened, and gouged kilometers, the scattered wreckage of Quinjet Nine stands in contrast to the sunny, blue sky. Natasha, Tony, and Rhodes collect what's left of their people, of Sam. Meanwhile, Quinjet Six is nowhere to be found. 
> 
> Stranded in the mountainous backcountry somewhere else in the world, Barnes and Sharon fight for their lives - and run from HYDRA's ticking time bomb clock named Steve Rogers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On a Tuesday, by special request. :)
> 
> Warnings: major character death, interpersonal violence, major character injury.

_Tap, tap, tap._

Barnes glances at his wrist: 0241. At this rate, in as little as a few decades, Steve may knock on his door at a reasonable hour of the morning.

"JARVIS, go ahead."

 _Click_.

Barnes doesn't look up from his book. It's Friday morning: he's officially off from Ops, he's got this week's Canary done, and he's all caught up with mission planning for Ops. He doesn't even have Naceri _or_  classes today.

Relatedly, food services dropped off an unexpected loaf of challah yesterday. Sharon commented "oh, pretty" and then thoughtlessly ate half of it. At least someone ate it, because it wouldn't have been  _him_.

"You're fucking meddling, aren't you," Barnes greets, without mentioning that, actually, he's really looking forward to living in this book series all morning, all day, and probably all night, with nothing to worry about except the occasional piss.

These days, those kinds of greetings stop  _no one_ , let alone Steve.

Steve keeps walking, then unapologetically plops down next to Barnes on the too-small sofa. As always, his bare size-14 feet go to the coffee table, pushing it forward by inches, while his hand magically zeroes in the Roku remote accidentally ass-stuffed between cushions.

Instead of Housewives, Steve goes to  _From Not to Hot_. Barnes has no idea what the hell show that it is, but, judging from the synopsis and the image, he can guess.

"Have you talked to Naceri about your trashy show obsession?" Barnes wonders aloud. "Did it come with the serum? Should I worry that I'll start showing signs?"

Steve ignores him. "Shabbat shalom."

The asshole motherfucker. "And also with you, you asshole Catholic."

Hair messy with sweat-dried cowlicks, reddish-purple blotches under his eyes, and unusually long stubble shadowing his face, Steve tilts his head and breaths out a smile. "I haven't been to Mass in years. But they changed that. Saw it on TV."

"Go," Barnes says, as easy as that.

Steve tears his eyes away from some lady named Mama June, eyebrows cocked. "You going to Temple?"

Fair's fair, theoretically. "No. I'm picking up a shift somewhere on base today, doing something, to piss you off."

Steve nods, eyes back on his really, really bad show. "I hear they're down a cook in the Cafeteria. Go for it."

So, so close to saying it, Barnes thinks,  _Would you eat down there, if I did?_  Instead, he winds down the conversation. "You always took it more seriously than I did."

He doesn't say,  _I never believed._

He sure as hell doesn't say,  _I sure as hell don't believe now_.

And he sure as  _fucking_ hell doesn't say,  _I'm only doing what I'm doing for my mom._

Like keeping kosher. Even while Sam stuffs his dumb face with pepperoni and cheese pizza.

That takes care of that: Steve willing to drop it, and Barnes more than happy to move on from ridiculous attempts at faith-keeping.

On the show, a little girl eats a line of orange fish crackers off a running treadmill. Barnes gawks for a couple seconds, then wordlessly goes back to his book.

"The world got weird," Steve comments, not inaccurately.

"Been weird. Remember when kids would fight over 'tree endurance' records? Put that shit on Facebook. And, you know, people got weird trying to get booze."

Steve clears his throat and gives Barnes a disapproving Captain America frown. "Including  _you_."

No comment, other than, "Hey, I turned out  _fine_."

Steve smiles again, wistful. "Remember when everybody went nuts when Peaches married…what's-his-name?'

"Daddy," Barnes provides. "When Peaches married Daddy. We were around ten."

"And Ragamuffin Day."

 _Christ_. Barnes'd forgotten about that dumb shit. "Proved my point. What happened tonight?"

Steve shakes his head, silent on the matter. His arms tuck around his stomach, feet dropping to the floor.

"Bad dream?"

Another head shake, but Steve untucks his arms and starts picking at his cuticles, false attention paid to a show that makes Barnes want the Housewives back.

"Memory?"

Nothing, this time. Bingo. Barnes waits for Steve to muster up the courage to talk about it.

It's not long.

Sounding a lot like a small kid from Brooklyn, ready to scramble into a back alley and choose a trash can lid as a weapon, Steve breaks a boundary. "Did they let you take warm showers?"

That's not the type of shit he talks about – not with Steve, not with Naceri, and hardly ever even with Natasha. It's intimate and humiliating – to acknowledge that HYDRA had controlled every part of him, down to showers, down to bathroom breaks.

He could roar at Steve: chew him up, spit him out, and kick him out. He could.

"Never. I didn't feel warm for a long time, so stop stealing my jackets."

Steve exhales the smallest breath, having learned by now how to ignore Barnes' flimsy distraction-jokes. "I forgot to drop the shower diverter. Got blasted with ice cold water. I broke the wall."

Steve drops his face into his waiting hands, fingers scrubbing at his scalp.

Barnes waits again, a trick he picked up from Sam and Naceri.

Steve finally says, "I only had two, maybe three showers there."

Barnes doubts that they were anything that could so kindly be classified as a "shower."

"It took me right back there. It doesn't make sense."

Often, Steve comes here and looks for answers, for commiseration, for support. Not as often, Barnes gets something positive out of it, too.

Openly, Barnes talks. "I got kicked off a train in Moscow – because I was a fucking mess. I paid a hotel concierge  _a lot_  of money to get me clothes and into a suite. She told me to eat, then shower, then get a haircut, in that order. I went to the shower, turned on the cold water, then turned it all the way to hot. I flinched so hard that I fell, hit my head, laid there, and looked at a spider for a while. Doesn't really make sense."

As he looked at that spider, he committed himself to a name, remembered Becca, and then went to bed and  _slept_. Not entirely a bad couple of hours.

Steve keeps rubbing at his scalp. "Why'd she tell you to eat? You eat all the time."

If Barnes had to guess, he'd say that Steve thinks that question is tantamount to running interference – a softball, rather than the speedball it is.

 _No one_ knows about the growing stash of stolen-processed-cafeteria-food he has hidden under his bed. It's shit he doesn't even  _like_. Is never going to eat. Doesn't need to eat, because the kitchen never goes empty, and the Cafeteria never closes. But it's there, because it can be.

"I didn't eat for days at a time. No one was there to feed me, and I didn't remember what hunger pains meant." Barnes laughs to hide embarrassment, shame, humiliation, all of the above. "If you and Sam would've found me then – fucking Christ."

Haunted, chest bobbing a little too quickly, face looking more exhausted, Steve looks up and all but ruptures. "I asked Maria to ground you. I've taken you off three critical missions."

Yeah, Barnes isn't stupid and has never bought Steve's lies about that. Of course it'd been Steve: finally having enough of a rational argument to convince Maria to do it.

"I know what they do, Buck. I can't – I won't lose you again."

Not right then, Barnes didn't have the heart to tell Steve that he'd replaced Natasha on Saturday's Romania mission.

What were the fucking chances.

***

The missile explodes outside the left back flank of the jet. The explosion is blinding, violent. From the left-side cockpit window, a streaming orange flame rages for a quick moment, before it fragments into a haze of red and black.

A whipping vortex of freezing wind sucks the air out of the cabin. Oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, and the instrument panel makes clear they've rapidly depressurized. Without having to look, Barnes is certain that there's a gaping hole in the left side of the cargo hold.

Sharon visibly blanches but her focus doesn't waver. The stick violently vibrates inside of its housing, both sets of her knuckles white around it. She's already sent the distress signal, reduced power, and initiated an emergency descent.

All very appropriate actions to take, except Barnes can hear something Sharon can't: microscopic splintering of the metal above them, and something louder from the back of the jet – creaking, twisting, knocking.

The bulkhead is going to disintegrate, and the left engine cowling is shearing off. He's seen it, lived it. Sharon won't.

Barnes unstraps himself, quickly slides Sharon's oxygen mask over her face, and pulls it down to activate it. She doesn't waste energy asking where he's going or why.

The instrument panel floods with flashing lights and blaring alarms; another one adds to the mix: right engine failure. The left one's already dead. Instantly, the jet perceptibly loses power and begins a sharp, should-be temporary plummet. The wings will provide lift by design, but it won't be enough.

Barnes holds himself steady, his right hand tangled in the ceiling netting. Before he turns away, he sees Sharon work to restart the right engine.

Three steps outside of the cockpit, the pull of vacuum and choppy, intense turbulence is almost too much, even for him. His comm piece sucks out of his ear, while his un-zipped, Kevlar-weaved jacket whips around his body until he intentionally lets it slurp through the jagged, loveseat-sized hole in the jet.

As he moves, he holds on as tightly as he can—to netting, to hand grips, to anything—without ripping those things from the jet's body. Rice-paper thin, the minty cabin air chills the skin of his nose and throat raw, and its ice coats his lungs with prickly, painful particles. Jet fuel and noxious, black smoke burns his eyes.

The crackling of tearing metal grows louder, and the knocking— _whap, whap, whap, whap_ —sounds looser. He glances up: a splintering crack crawls along the hull. The jet only has seconds before it breaks apart.

The right engine restarts with a  _hum_  and the telltale sensation of purposeful lift.

_Whap, whap, whap, whap._

Barnes pops the first sealed overhead compartment he can reach, allows himself a moment of relief, and pulls out a single parachute with his left hand. Hurriedly, he turns and pulls himself back into the cockpit.

"The hull's cracking," he says, but his voice isn't powerful enough to carry.

Sharon's eyes don't leave the controls.

 _Whapwhapwhapwhapwhap_.

Barnes straps on the parachute, pulls it tight, and then doesn't ask or warn Sharon. He rips her seat straps apart and then lifts her out of the seat by her armpits.

_Whapwhap – CLANK._

It's funny the way time slows, how long a second stretches, and how sound sieves itself into precise, perfect clarity.

_Crash –_

He steps backward, both arms wrapped around Sharon's body.

_Crash –_

Her oxygen mask shoots by them and out the cargo hold, slow enough that he can read the name its manufacturer: Norio.

_Crash –_

He watches Sharon's hands come up to shield her face, so long-drawn-out that he notices every chip and peel of her clear nail polish and every pointed goosebump erupting over her bare arms. Her earbud vibrates, rocking back and forth inside her ear, until it plucks itself out and zooms away.

The damaged left engine cowling crashes through the cockpit—or, rather, the jet flies itself into it—just as the pull of the air vacuum wrenches them backwards through the hole in the jet.

He hears Sharon's gritted-teeth groan, a guttural release of a tangled ball of fear and nervous energy.

All he's gotta do is not let go.

He won't let go.

The atmosphere outside the jet is soundless. The sky is dark gray; the wisps of ephemeral clouds surrounding them, even darker. They fall, like he's fallen before, again and again in his dreams, in his nightmares, in his daydreams and thoughts.

The jet sloughs parts, pieces, and bits of equipment, spewing a dangerous debris field in its raging wake. He watches the shadow of the airframe shear into two pieces and listens to Sharon wheeze frantic breaths.

Her fingers dig into his bare-skinned right arm. Her loose hair thrashes and tangles.

He flips them over, so that his back shields her from the debris. It's a risk to the parachute, but – if Sharon gets hit, she dies, and that's game over.

They break through dense cloud cover into pitch black darkness. No lights. No cities. No towns. No roads. Where the fox and the hare say goodnight.

His left arm secures Sharon as tightly and safely as anything else could, but he feels her legs intentionally wrap around his. Until they don't, and until her hands and her body goes limp, all its tension slipping away. It's hypoxia, with all its potential of brain damage.

Barnes carefully maneuvers their bodies into a head-down, vertical freeflying position, so that they fall faster. A quicker descent ensures oxygen for Sharon and a faster retreat from the wreckage.

He closes his eyes and lowers his head. Small bits of that wreckage batter against his back. Although he hasn't prayed in decades, and although he doesn't believe, he sends a prayer-like thought upwards:  _please don't damage the 'chute._

If god's real, he's a giant fucking jerk off.

A piece of hard, jagged wreckage knocks Barnes' senses clear out of him, so far out that Barnes can't even put together where he got hit.

His ears fill with a high-pitched  _ring_ , at the same time an opaque, black film clouds his vision. Like a frightened spider, he curls even tighter around Sharon's limp body.

He tells his left arm to stay the fuck put, and he begins to count the seconds.

_One, two. Three, four. Four, five. Seven –_

He loses track of the numbers, as easy as that. Red blobs dance, float, and flash in his visual field, and his head does barrel rolls and sweeping loops. A growing, throbbing pain swells under the right side of his forehead.

_No, no, no, not right now, not right now, not –_

_***_

Natasha sprints as fast as her legs can carry her down the hallway on Six. She dodges a trainee, shouting "move!" as she goes, and slams into the stairwell. She tears down three stories of stairs in seconds, pounds through the door to Three, and flat-out runs to Ops.

Inside, she rushes through the conference room and skids into the War Room.

Security Teams Two and Five have beat her here, all of their weapons drawn and aimed at a single person.

"Make a path," Natasha orders, fully aware and taking advantage that, without Maria, without Rhodes, and without the person Steve used to be, this is her command now.

The guards make a small path, weapons unwavering. Natasha makes herself calmly walk between them, heart trying to beat out of her chest, throat trying to become as thin as paper.

"Medical is on the way, Ma'am."

Two of the Ops crew kneel on the floor, blocking Natasha's view of Maria. They're not doing CPR: that's a good sign. It means Maria has a pulse.

Hands shaking in his lap, Steve sits ass-flat on the floor only a few feet from Maria. Pale, with wide, staring eyes, he doesn't seem to mind the guns pointed at him or notice Natasha's presence.

She steps past the Ops crew and kneels next to Steve, putting herself between him and most of those guns. "Hey, Steve."

He doesn't look away from Maria. Tone flat, voice empty, he says, "I hit her. Is she dead?"

"No. She's not. Cho's coming. Did you black out?"

"I hit her." He inhales a deep breath. "They're all dead."

All she's heard is "Six and Nine went down" and "Captain Rogers attacked Director Hill."

"We don't know that, Steve."

Voice still hollow, tone still unemotional, Steve still doesn't look away from Maria. "I saw it."

Natasha puts them out of her mind. The critical situation is in this room. "Okay."

At that moment, Cho and a medical team enter the room, Naceri and her team right behind. Natasha lets herself feel sweet, cold relief without showing it.

Before Naceri whisks Steve away, Natasha tries and fails to catch his eyes. "I'll be here, Steve. Go with Naceri now."

It's that easy: Steve stands up, still ignores the weapons, and lets one of Naceri's technicians take his arm.

Meanwhile, Natasha catches a quick glimpse of Maria, already loaded and strapped onto a gurney. Blood trickles from her ears.

The air evaporates from the room. The floor might even disappear. Natasha's stomach turns bottomless and loses gravity.  _It's bad_.

"Ma'am?"

Natasha blinks. Ops is silent: no tit-tatting of keyboards, no tip-tapping of screens, no talking, no comm chatter. They're waiting for her.

"Sitrep" is all it takes to pierce the uncertain tension in the room. They get to work.

A woman saddles up to Natasha, talking a mile a minute. "Quinjets Nine and Six were both shot down with an unknown projectile. Nine is confirmed destroyed on video. Six disappeared from radar at 31,000 feet. Colonel Rhodes is en route to base; ETA ten minutes. Quinjet Two and Mr. Stark are already separately en route to the target site; ETA two hours."

On her tablet, a roster of those missing until confirmed otherwise loads. The list is small: Barajas, T., Wilson, S., Carter, S., Barnes, J.

 _They're dead_ , Natasha thinks. She says, "Tell the hangar bay to prep Quinjet Eight. When Colonel Rhodes arrives, I'm joining the SAR. And get Banner down here."

She knows exactly what Rhodes will say:  _you're all flying into a trap_.

So be it.

***

Barnes' body jerks, panic constricting every major muscle. Instantly, he thinks  _Sharon_.

He opens his eyes to the dark outlines of thick tree trunks and tall, skinny weeds. Blades of long grass irritate his face. He drags his right boot against dirt and gravel.

It registers:  _we're on the fucking ground_.

He smells an overwhelming scent of thick blood.

Then:  _I dropped her._

He startles, heart blasting into a snarled race; his brain twists beyond all training and conditioning, and he can only think  _I dropped her, I dropped her, I fucking dropped her, I dropped her_. His hands slide through gritty, dry dirt, as he pushes himself up and comes face to face with –

"Hold still," Sharon says, he thinks. Strangely, he can barely hear her. "Your forehead is bleeding."

Relief floods through him so fast he must have whiplash. " _Jesus_ ," he breathes. "Are you okay?"

He expects an immediate answer but barely notices when one doesn't come. Rather, with Sharon safe, he notices the ringing in his ears, the red-hot railroad spike plunging back and forth into his head, and the simmering prickles spreading through his salivary glands. He might throw up.

"да, Я в норме," Sharon replies, tone hesitant, accent not great, words a bit muddled, and something breathless about her voice. "С Вами все нормально?"

It's hard to multitask between worries right now – why does his head feel so bad, how long has it been, where's the people who shot them down, who are the people who shot them down, did Nine make it out, why is he so nauseous, why does his head hurt so much, where are they, where's the safest place to go, where's the most strategic place to go – but he focuses right the fuck in on what she'd just said.

"Why're you talking in Russian?" he asks. Even with the high-pitched humming in his ears, he hears his tone: offended and flustered. Not his best.

"Because you are," Sharon flatly answers, still in Russian.

Sam's mentioned that before. Barnes doesn't have the energy to worry about flipping to a non-default language.

"Thank you," Sharon says in English. Her fingers brush against his forehead and tie something uncomfortable and scratchy there.

He has no idea why she's thanking him. "Okay."

"Are you okay?" she asks again, this time in English.

His skull is in the middle of cracking in half. When he closes his eyes, he feels a tight, strange pulling sensation on his forehead, separate from her fingers poking at the wound. Sharon doesn't need to know any of that.

"Sure," he replies.

He blinks to clear his vision, wills it to stabilize, but it doesn't. Sharon, the trees, and the dark air fade from dim shadows to nothing, back to shadows, and then to nothing.

He blinks again.

Still nothing.

 _God damn it_.

"Where are we?" he asks, stupidly hoping she knows.

They'd been flying at noon local time: broad daylight, sunny day, pretty blue sky. It's dark here – and it'd been dark before the jet disintegrated, so it's not his vision failing. They either somehow lost time, or somehow ended up somewhere else.

Sharon's fingers leave his forehead, and he hears the hollow, faraway sound of fabric ripping.

"Not far from where we landed. My leg is injured."

Sharon's injured leg is one thing. Being close to the crash site is a quick end-game.

"How long?" he asks, pressured.

"Sixteen minutes. We need to move."

He nods, then regrets it. Vertigo spins the darkness like a child's top, his stomach rolls, and he swears to fucking  _god_ that spike in his head drives all the way through, end-to-end.

"Okay, so…" Sharon pauses, and he hears clothing rustle, then the subtle sound of air moving – like a hand is moving back and forth. "You can't see."

Yeah, Sharon's not stupid, and they're altogether pretty fucked.

"How bad's your leg?"

"Bad enough."

"Can you walk?"

"Limited. It's the left leg."

Good enough. Dizzy, Barnes stands up, finds Sharon's left side, wraps his left arm around her, and supports her weight. "If that hurts…"

"It doesn't matter. Walk straight ahead, west."

Barnes trusts her instruction. It only takes a few steps to establish a synced rhythm, but he notices that she's not putting  _any_ weight on her injured leg.

"The terrain is flat for another fifty meters. Then, it inclines by thirty degrees – steep."

"Any way to avoid?"

"No good way."

"Wonderful."

He feels the ground gradually begin to incline. Sharon's fingers dig into his back, seeking balance and more support. He does her one better: takes almost all of her weight with his left arm and lifts her a little off the ground, careful not to crush her.

Sharon swallows back a choked moan. "You don't have to do that."

"It's a perk, okay?"

Relying on Sharon to warn him of obstacles, he powers them up the incline. Every footfall shoots a flash of red through his visual field and stabs of pressured pain into his head. It reminds him of a poached egg, its yolk primed to pop with the tiniest, most gentle of mistakes.

Sharon groans, gritted and terse. "We're there; we're there."

He feels the change in the ground and adjusts his speed and power accordingly. He gently lowers Sharon back down and doesn't miss her hiss of pain.

That smell of blood from before hasn't lessened. It still smells like fresh and thick.

He doesn't know if they should keep moving, or if they should stop and care for her leg. He doesn't know how he could help her, other than getting them to a safe-enough shelter.

"Lots of trees," Sharon states, voice shaking, "but it's flat."

"Just tell me which way to step."

The only way to survive is to move away from the crash site. Distance is everything. Or, in other words: they've gotta run.

"Go right."

He steps right and feels the trunk of a tree brush against his body. Further right, next time.

"Step – log."

He steps and lifts, clearing a wet-smelling log with a  _crunch_  of leaves and another groan from Sharon.

"Straight," Sharon huffs. "At least fifty meters. We've got this."

He doesn't say that they don't have a choice  _but_ to have this.

***

For two and a half burnt, blackened, and gouged kilometers, the scattered wreckage of Quinjet Nine stands in contrast to the sunny, blue sky.

A twisted, charred wing.

Half of an engine.

The mangled remains of a landing gear.

A hand.

A foot.

Part of a spinal cord.

Without JARVIS, the body parts wouldn't have been found for days. As it is, JARVIS has located enough of Sam and Barajas to make enough of a collection to send home to parents and families.

No question. No miracle. No last-minute save.

People die.

Natasha watches their people, Romanian Armed Forces, and USAF personnel methodically sweep and flag the debris field.

Voice subdued, face inscrutable behind the façade of Iron Man, Tony comments, "No HYDRA. They would've been here, right?"

By now, certainly. "No Six."

The identified wreckage and parts are only for Quinjet Nine.

Tony doesn't hesitate. "JARVIS, update on Six's wreckage?"

The response comes through her ear piece. "There are no identifiable signs of additional wreckage within 500 kilometers of your location."

A telltale sign of JARVIS's sophistication, he continues without being prompted. "Additionally, Quinjet Six's transponder ceased transmission two hours, fourteen minutes, and thirty-nine seconds ago."

Natasha had reviewed the telemetry captured by Ops; the last pieces of data had clearly indicated a catastrophic hole in the side of the jet, one that would only lead to a structural failure. That jet didn't come down intact.

Tony's already a step ahead. "JARVIS, scan for gamma radiation within 300 kilometers. I want to know about  _anything_."

Incredulous, Natasha turns toward Tony, face to face with glowing eyes and an infuriating, impartial face. "You and Banner said the suits would prevent that."

The helmet folds away, revealing a worried face lined by purple blots under bloodshot eyes. "They would. But the tech only works if they're wearing the whole suit – otherwise, probably not so pretty. Check the hangar video: this morning, your boyfriend didn't zip his jacket, and Carter took but wasn't wearing hers. Either the jet went without them, or they're somewhere else."

If the jet went without them, they plummeted for 34,000 feet, landing and dying somewhere, anywhere, where JARVIS may never know to scan.

Sharon  _might_  be alive.

James is almost definitely dead.

Irrational anger collapses into a pit of bleak despair.

***

The following two and a half hours pass between a handful of crackly words: right, left, log, straight, careful, rough terrain, smooth. If pressed, Barnes wouldn't be able to give a reliable estimate of distance travelled; maybe twelve kilometers, if that, and still well within the searchable debris zone.

"Left."

Though Sharon sounds louder, it's not because she is. The high-pitched whine in his ears is slowly fading to a faint buzz, quiet enough that he hears the mix of Sharon's wheezes and the drone of nocturnal creatures and insects.

He hasn't heard helicopters, military jets, or vehicles. A few passenger jets have crossed overhead, their engines a dim hum in the far distance. Nothing threatening.

Barnes opens his eyes to check his own status. He sees a fuzzy outline of a boulder – "left again," Sharon's voice dims like those plane engines – and vertical black scratches that might be tree trunks.

"You doing okay?" he asks.

He feels her nod, a lie. She's not doing okay.

Five meters ahead, an old, thick tree looms in their way. He adjusts their course to avoid it and tells Sharon that he's got it.

It must be another thirty minutes before the forest actually looks like a forest, and another ten before he spots owls perched high in the trees and the silhouettes of foraging deer and fox far away. The pressure inside his right forehead pulses and throbs, but he's coming back online.

This part of Romania is supposed to be deciduous, not coniferous, but he swears the trees are firs, pines, and spruces, and he swears he smells cedar. Underfoot, soft layers of brown pine needles stick to his boots.

These trees don't belong here; more than anything, they remind him of that useless mission into the backcountry of Washington state.

High above in the sky, the constellations are what they should be in the northern hemisphere. That rules out half of the world, while Barnes is mostly certain the sun's gonna come up in another hour. That puts them in the Pacific time zone, near the West Coast of the US or Canada.

Sometime after the missile hit them, they got portaled, for whatever reason. He doesn't remember seeing blue – but he remembers the minty, cold feeling, which he'd attributed to the frigid vacuum of high-altitude air and adrenaline.

His gut instinct tells him that HYDRA will be here come sunrise. Without knowing precisely where they are, he doesn't know how far away the nearest city might be, or if there's any chance of finding help before HYDRA finds them.

Before they come, he has to know what limitations they have.

About 250 meters northwest, he notices a shallow, narrow valley – well, more like a dip in the forest floor. Heavily vegetated with crawling green vines and a thick tangle of brown branches, it will provide good cover for a temporary respite.

Sharon silent and unquestioning, he walks them to it and gently sets her down on her butt. Her body resembles a tense livewire, clenched and guarded, even as she leans against a berm of dirt, eyes pinched tight.

That smell of blood permeates the air.

In the morning moonlight, Sharon's pale lips disappear into her ashen, sweat-shined face. Her breathing comes as shallow, quick, and ragged rasps. Her hands tremble.

He drags his eyes down to her left leg and –

She's going to lose the leg,  _if_  she lives.

Jagged pieces of jet shrapnel entrench in four deep, long, flapping wounds that stretch from her upper thigh to above her knee. Slivers of white bone peer out from between skin, muscle, and tendons. Blood seeps out of the wounds, caking her leg and staining the ground red.

"Why didn't you say something."

Her eyes snap open. "It doesn't change what we have to do."

He doesn't spare the time to argue about it.

Carefully, he peels away a blood-soaked scrap of black parachute that barely hangs from her leg. Another scrap of the fabric has been tied as a near-useless tourniquet around her thigh; he leaves it be.

He doesn't have a pack. Doesn't have medical supplies.

He's wearing a t-shirt, no tac vest, with a couple knives and two handguns between two thigh holsters. He knows better than to fly ungeared – but he'd done it.

So had Sharon.

They're both so fucked. Vulnerable. Hurt. All but fucking helpless.

Barnes takes the bloody fabric and wrings it out, blood coating his hands and pouring into the dirt.

Her  _armored_ pant leg is shredded, without any good way to cut the useless fabric away. As such, the wounds haven't been treated. Barnes cocks his head and looks at it, trying to figure  _how_ to treat it.

There's one way.

"I'm taking your pants off," he warns, not letting it be a question.

Sharon huffs out an unlikely laugh. "Steve's gonna kill you."

He pulls off her combat boots, one by one. "What else is new."

The left boot is soaked, a decanter of blood.

Sharon's trembling fingers fumble the button and zipper undone, her eyes meeting his to give unspoken permission – and unspoken recognition that it's going to hurt like hell.

He slides her right pant leg off first, stupidly relieved to see that she's wearing black exercise leggings. As she bends her right knee up to give him berth to work, a stupid grin lights up her ashen face.

"So sorry to disappoint."

Since she's probably gonna die, and since he's probably going to end up going home with HYDRA, he matches her grin without feeling any possible mirth. "I think of you like my sister."

"Kinky."

He unties the tourniquet and watches blood begin to swell, then flood down her leg. Intentional with his timing, he says "you remind me of her" as he yanks her left pant leg off.

Sharon shrieks, head thrown so far back her neck muscles bulge, even as she swallows back a louder scream.

He pays her no mind, focused on slipping the tourniquet around her thigh and yanking it as tightly as he can. Which, given his left arm…

Sharon's arms give out, and she hits the ground hard on her back. Her hands go to her face, cupping over her mouth, back arched, right foot scraping across the hard ground.

He ties it off and watches the surge of blood slow. It doesn't stop, though.

Her leggings are torn and ripped, revealing more skin than not. That pale skin is mottled deep red and purple, deeply torn and lacerated, shrapnel embedded in bone, fat, and muscle.

It's bad. It's really bad.

He's not taking out the shrapnel. It is where it is, and for now, arteries aren't spitting blood at him.

As Sharon chokes back whimpers, Barnes smoothly wraps the other piece of parachute around her leg, much like she'd originally had it. He moves quickly and precisely, the fabric lasting long enough for four and a half meager layers.

He pulls its two edges somewhat tight—ignoring how her fingers clench her face—and ties them into a good, sure knot.

Barnes sits back on his haunches and exhales. Wipes his hands on his non-absorbent pants.

Sharon's hands drop to the ground, body leeching tension.

His tension ramps up. It's been about thirty minutes – far too long.

Voice shaking, Sharon lies flat, as he begins to put her shoes back on. "What was that with you?"

Barnes avoids meeting her eyes by taking longer on her shoes than needed. He even takes one off and puts it back on again, fussing with the laces.

"Bucky," she pushes.

His eyes flick up, but only to shut that down. "Don't call me that."

He's learned well by now that Sharon doesn't apologize. "How long?"

He could lie to her: say that it started when a piece of Quinjet Six's wreckage hit him in the head. He could ignore her until she inevitably gives up. Hell, he could go home, get an MRI, and finally see the damage that had once spooked HYDRA.

"It's serious."

"That a question?" he asks.

"An observation."

He sighs, then notices a growing dark spot under the fabric near her knee. That significantly decreases their workable timetable.

"Sam knows," he acquiesces. They need to get moving and stop wasting time on this. "Okay?"

"Sam's not a doctor."

Barnes tamps down on the urge to sigh again. "We need to go. I can't stop the bleeding."

Sharon sits up, eyes glassy, face paler, and flicks her eyes to her leg. She locks onto that dark spot and is absolute steel, when she extends her hand and says, "Let's go then."

***

Tony doesn't feel pride when he watches JARVIS' whip-quick digital rendering of the two jet crashes. Nauseous, maybe. Furious, maybe. Not pride.

Bruce sits up straight in his chair, eyes watchfully bouncing between Tony and Natasha – who looks like she could incinerate the world from the convenience of the conference room. "The missiles weren't surface-to-air. JARVIS' model is 95% confident that they came from above."

From an aircraft that hadn't been detected on the radars either inside the jets or here on base. It's not until this very moment that it strikes Tony: "They have a helicarrier. A cloaked fucking helicarrier."

It explains the eight months of random radiation bursts with very few ground installations to show for them. It explains the cat and mouse game that they've been losing since day one.

Natasha merely moves her gaze toward Tony, apparently less interested in his revelations than in the crash reconstruction. And that? Shows Nine explode, Sam along with it, while Six's trajectory remained consistent with it flying straight into the extrapolated range of a gamma burst. The end.

Bruce keeps talking. "My best guess is that our jets were flying at or near the same altitude. HYDRA fired on both jets, ran, and accidentally took Six along for the ride. I seriously doubt the mission itself was the target. We just finally found something."

Tony unconsciously nods along with the story, agreeing and seeing nothing to argue.

Prudently, Bruce continues. "There have been no reports from anywhere in the world about a Quinjet crash, or anything strangely similar. It either went to the other world, or they popped up somewhere considerably remote. Before you ask: we're scanning all frequencies in case something comes through, and I'm working on a way to find the helicarrier."

Tony shoots Bruce a questioning look:  _uh, my idea two seconds ago! How's that?_

"Oh, I got there way before you," Bruce says. "Keeping up is hard; I know."

Any other day, that'd almost be funny. Today, no matter what, they're going to have to find that carrier, and stop it, even if that means –

There's only three people left in this room, plus Rhodey.

– even if it means burning what's left of SHIELD down to do it.

Natasha's tablet  _slaps_ onto the metal conference table. "So, we don't know anything more than we did seven hours ago."

Knowing it's a helicarrier is a big deal. It'd be a bigger deal to know where the hell it portaled to, if only so they could add to the bags of body parts sitting in the morgue. Sharon, at least, has family who would like to memorialize and bury those parts.

It'd be an even bigger deal if they knew where it was  _now_ , so they could end this or them.

"Nat…" Bruce tries with apparently no idea where to go. "We'll find them."

The spy doesn't speak; the friend does. "Like we found Sam?" Natasha blinks, quickly bites the inside of her cheek, and inaudibly sighs. "Can you track his arm?"

Two sets of eyes on him, Tony tries not to be defensive.  _Tries_. "I was told not to—and I quote—'even fucking think about it.' So! While I  _thought about it_ , no, I never made that possible. If we had a general location, JARVIS could scan for the metal composite, but that's the best we've got on that."

He might as well say that there's almost no available chance here to find them – not now, not tomorrow, not ever. Natasha knows that.

Bruce doesn't. "Look, the crash model for Six leaves a lot of room for survival. If they made it out and are on the ground, they'll find a way to communicate. We're listening."

 _Wrong_. If they made it out, they already would have clicked their comms three times and told JARVIS there's no place like home. So.

For the sake of the people in this room, right here and right now, Tony keeps his mouth shut.

***

Behind them, the rising sun burns orange rays through rows of still-black trees. Perched among barren wintertime branches, dozens of small birds sing with the burst of morning.

A few kilometers further behind, engines roar, displaced air whistles, and unfamiliar voices blend together into an indistinguishable din, except for one. Just one.

Sharon's voice wavers. "The birds are nice."

Barnes nearly laughs. He almost forgets what it's like to not hear everything, to be able to live for a few minutes longer without knowing what's coming.

"They're here, aren't they."

So much for that. "Yeah."

"SHIELD should've been here first. Hours ago."

Yes, they should have been, and he's sure that they went to Romania hours ago. They're on their own here, with HYDRA and Rogers right behind them.

"Stop talking. He can hear you."

He looks at her to soften the severity of the statement. She responds with silent acknowledgment and a smart amount of trepidation.

He tightens his arm and picks up their pace, carrying most of Sharon's weight. She doesn't protest, either out of fear, pain, or exhaustion, maybe all three.

The terrain on their right slopes upward; although gradual at first, in the distance, it becomes steeper and higher. About eighty meters to their left, the terrain dips downward until the green trees, their sea of needles, and the crinkly grass disappear. A wide wall of dark conifers looms dead ahead, too dense to see through.

Barnes hauls them to those conifers, crossing into the tree line as fat rain drops begin to splatter against his face. The tree-top canopy blocks most of the morning light and drops the cold winter temperature even lower; lingering frost glitters on dull pine needles and dusts the forest floor.

Ninety meters ahead, he glimpses a glint of stone from the ground to at least sixty meters high, and as wide as his eye can see. No good way forward.

That leaves them with the steep slope to the right, the steep decline to the left, or waiting here for Rogers and HYDRA.

 _Fuck_.

Barnes drops Sharon to the ground and drags her backwards under the cover of a thick tree. She's unconscious, and the blood dripping from her leg has drowned the parachute fabric.

"Hey." He lightly taps Sharon's cheek. "Hey."

Sharon struggles to open her eyes. Eyes glazed and listless, she's barely there. She can neither fight nor defend herself – and even if he was in any condition to singlehandedly neutralize both Rogers and a full HYDRA unit, the risk is too great for her.

He's not going home without her.

They're going to run for it.

"I'll be right back."

Sharon grunts an affirmative response, and her hand reaches to settle on her sidearm. Good enough. He leaves her there and trots back the way they'd come.

The rain has picked up into a steady downpour, while a strong, fresh petrichor saturates the air. Although he struggles to distinguish the sounds of HYDRA's team from the patter of that rain, the skies are clear of jets and helicopters.

At the downward slope, he peers down into a sea of green needles that reaches from the tips of his boots to the horizon.

The downgrade is breakneck, and, worse, leads to backcountry wilderness, not a road or house in sight. Though it may keep HYDRA off their trail, Sharon would never make it out: a safe, assured way to die.

He turns and runs to the upward slope. The angle of it is obtuse, maybe 135, and spotted with rocks and tree trunks. Not terrible. Unquestionably, he can get Sharon up the incline. At issue: what's at the top and then down the other side.

Barnes powers up the inclination, reaching the ridge and the end of the world in only a few seconds.

The other side of the ridge drops into a decline made of sharp jagged boulders, with a canyon floor made of slippery gravel, rolling gullies, and looming reddish-gray mountains. Tall, dry falls, steep canyons, hard washes, and rows of serrated ridges define the sprawling landscape.

It's a Scablands.

Everything sinks: his heart, his gut, his hope, his plan.

Quinjets hum, mere kilometers away. Those are the ticket out – while he has two nine-millimeters and a couple of knives, that's all.

_Why here? Why here?_

They'd been transported to another location: maybe accidentally, maybe not. Either way, there's something here. Something means transportation – without going through Rogers and dozens of soldiers.

Something's here.

He drops to his belly and squints through the rain. The human brain is designed to find patterns and make shapes where there are none; sometimes, for some people, that can be fatally misleading. Other times, for him, it's been the only reason he's survived.

Barnes takes the precious time to scan the landscape: across the canyons, the rugged hills, the sharp ridges, and the sullen red-grays and browns of rock and dirt.

The sound of the Quinjet's engines intensify, a couple hundred meters away. It's only one jet – not coming for them but for that something that's here.

Barnes flattens himself into the muddy ground, sinks a few centimeters into slippery, gritty muck, and stills. The rain and drab colors will camouflage him enough.

Through thick sheets of pounding rain, he watches the jet descend into the Scablands, already well into landing protocol.

Four and a half klicks northwest, near a dry riverbed, red landing pad lights blink-blink-blink. The jet swivels around and drops cleanly down to the ground, next to a flat, gray building he hadn't otherwise picked out from the maze-like mess of hills and canyons.

He commits its location to memory – as a target.

Barnes slides down the hill, mud and muck pelting against his arms and face. Nearby spikes of lightning shake the ground, as the cold rain impossibly picks up into thicker sheets that ferociously spit from the dark sky.

From the tips of his hair to the tips of his toes, he's drenched and sopping wet. His thin t-shirt sticks to him like a second skin, while red-tinged water rolls off his chin and onto his arm.

He touches his forehead, tears away a strip of useless cloth, and quickly looks at his fingers: slathered in blood that's rapidly washed away by the downpour. That's bad.

Barnes makes his way back to Sharon. Under the sprawling limbs of a conifer, she has her weapon drawn and steadily aimed, finger hovering over the trigger.

"Hold fire."

Her arm drops and body slackens. "Is it bad?"

"We have a way to go. C'mon."

He pulls her up, ignores her choked yelp of pain, and takes the weight of her body. He walks them out of the tree line into the still-pounding storm and dares to look back east.

It's quiet, he thinks. He doesn't see anyone. Doesn't hear anyone. The storm might buy them time, but it won't stop Rogers.

It wouldn't stop Steve.

_So where are you. Find us._

Without warning her, Barnes picks Sharon up and easily drapes her over his shoulders, in a fireman's carry. It leaves his arms somewhat free to help him power them up the slippery incline.

"I hate you," Sharon mumbles, part of the strange love language that he and Sam had created. "Payback's gonna be a bitch."

The incline is harder this time. Mud slides down toward them, splashing at his arms and face. His feet slip, struggling to find traction. Every step seems to net him negative numbers, until he decides to  _fuck it_.

"Hold on."

Sharon squeezes around him, hands scratching at his torso, right before he pounds his left hand into the rockface. He pulls them up, uses that gouge as a foothold, and bores another hole into the rock.

He spits out water, rock, and mud, the rain coming almost too fast to breathe.

Thunder rumbles and roars in the near distance.  _Cracks_ of lightning light up to the east, sending shocks and vibrations sizzling through the ground. The fierce wind whips Sharon's hair against his neck and face.

_Snap! CRASH!_

Behind them, trees fall.

Over and over again, he punches and climbs, until his knees hit the top of the ridge. He rolls Sharon to the ground and coughs out water, as he slides to the edge and looks out toward the Scablands.

His eyes land on the gray building: bingo.

Sharp and loud, voices cut through the howling of the wind and rain. HYDRA's ground team is only a kilometer out at most—probably less—their voices carried by the echoes of the valley. It's a very short lead that will waste away very quickly.

The climb down is going to be harder than the one they just accomplished. He'll need his arms and hands.

Sharon hasn't moved from where he set her down. Her head lolls toward a puddle, nose and mouth dangerously close to it.

He doesn't risk shouting her name, but he crawls on hands and knees to her, right hand going to her carotid pulse point.

Her left comes up and clutches his. "I'm here," she gasps.

Barely here.

A saddleback carry is the best way he can think of. She has to be conscious for that.

He dips down low and quietly asks, "Can you hold onto me?"

Eyes closed, lips paler than her face, she nods against the ground. "I'm here."

He doesn't necessarily believe her, but he also doesn't second guess her. Wishful thinking is nice.

He pulls Sharon to her feet, her body barely able to support her weight, left leg useless, and pulls her against his back: her arms over his shoulders, her legs by his waist, her voice hissing agony.

Her weight is nothing for him to carry, and he takes the first step toward the cliff. Immediately, he turns and plants his hands palm-flat against the cold, wet stone and slimy, sludging mud.

Sharon's arms tighten around his upper chest, and her right leg curls around his stomach.

He moves them downward, a slick handhold at a time. Wavy spirals of water flow over his hands, rock crumbling.

He anchors his left-handed fingers into the rock with each step backward.

"Mudslide?" Sharon rasps.

"Not yet."

But hopefully soon: cover their tracks, cover their scent, and gift them a few extra minutes. Or: drown them in mud and save HYDRA the trouble. Either way.

Over the deafening beat of the storm curling around them, he barely hears Sharon cough: thick, wet, and panicked.

Rain slips over his face, each inhalation sucking less oxygen than water. A shock of lightning sizzles through the ground, snapping out a deafening boom.

Sharon tenses.

His right hand loses its grip. His right foot slides through a loose piece of rock. He compensates with his left hand, their bodies dropping the length of his arm span with a violent, painful jerk.

Sharon's hands drag down his back, her nails clawing uselessly at his soaked t-shirt, then down his leg and past his boot.

Gone.

Barnes lets go of the rock face entirely, twists his body as he drops, and catches Sharon's outstretched hand with his left. He glimpses the ground - hard, sharp rocks, fifteen feet below, a death sentence for Sharon.

He pulls her body flush up to his, wraps his arms around her, flips around, and sees the storm-swirled, dark gray sky far above, a moment before he slams into the ground.

Rain patters against his face.

" _James_."

The sky is dark, flushed gray and stained black. Sheets of rain brutally pound against the battered ground and his battered body. Strings of lightning roll through the clouds; booms of their strikes rumble against his back.

His back. It hurts so badly.

"Breathe."

On that good advice, he complies, letting out a long-held breath, and instantly regrets it. Sharp, shooting pain severs his muscles and liquifies his spine - at least, that's the way it feels.

"We have to move."

Sharon's voice comes as a thick, stretchy echo bouncing between his ringing ears.

Barnes drags his feet up, the soles of his boots scraping against soggy dirt and rock. He wiggles his fingers, all ten of them, to make sure his spine actually  _isn't_ severed.

All of that settled, he rolls onto his stomach and pushes himself to his knees, stretching his back as far as it will bend.

Even that inconsequential movement crashes pain through his body. For too many moments, he can't even find a breath. A splintering, jagged pain cracks his head in half, over and over and over, again. Likewise, the back of his neck spasms and contracts, tight and burning.

HYDRA is coming, and the pain doesn't matter.

On his feet, he extends his right hand to Sharon. He doesn't comment on her too-pale skin, darkening circles under her eyes, or the blood loss. All he can do for her is to get them to that jet, and then do whatever he can to get them out.

"Yeah. Let's go."

Sharon limply cradled over his shoulders again, he hauls ass away from the slope, eyes locked onto a waterlogged wash that bends into a tall, reddish-brown canyon.

A booming roar bellows behind them, full of sharp  _cracks!_ and slow, moaning  _splinnnnters!_ of wood colliding with rock and gushing, water-tinged orange mud.

Barnes spares a fleeting glance behind at the sheer tons of earth oozing down the slope, furiously chased by dozens upon dozens of broken conifers and bits of jagged rock that burst over the crest of the ridge.

He splashes into the wash, boots sinking into silt. He can't go fast, but he does  _go_ , slurping and slopping further and further into canyon. The mudslide growls mere meters behind them, but he doesn't waste precious time checking to see how close or far or fast or slow it might be.

The wash elevates incrementally, until it forks off into three paths: straight, left, or right. He chooses to go right.

A few steps in, the silt transitions to a hard, slick, smooth rock, and he picks up pace. He hops them up a stout dry waterfall, straight into a narrow canyon barely wide enough for elbow room.

"Y'kay?" Sharon mumbles.

He'll never admit that her trivial weight is damn near enough to crack his back in half. "Been better."

"Wh-where?"

"Not where we're supposed to be. There's a base and a jet up ahead."

He doesn't hear her say anything in response.

"It's all there is," he says.

"L-leave me. Go."

Even with the rain, the mudslide, and the maze of washes and canyons down here, Steve can find them. She may not know that.

"He can smell blood," Barnes says, leaving the implication of how he knows that unstated.

Sharon huffs out a wheezed breath. "Great."

Thankfully, she doesn't ask if he can do it, when—and it's definitely when—the ticking time bomb clock catches up to them.

***

Arms braced on limestone, Natasha watches Quinjet Two enter landing protocol, then sink onto its landing pad, skids down and locked.

A third of Sam is home.

On her tablet, Quinjet Three indicates a successful landing in Romania, another team launched to search and recover.

Natasha swipes to a different screen, where there are no updates for her to read.

That means Maria is still in surgery.

Steve is sedated, now using HYDRA's actual cocktail of drugs rather than SHIELD's attempt at a kinder, less potent mix. Something about him trying to steal his security detail's service weapon.

JARVIS hasn't found anything: no helicarrier, no James, no Sharon. In July, he'd picked up the slightest sliver of a murmur from them and saved the entire day. Nothing today.

Something would have come through, by now. They would have radioed in.

Quinjet Two lowers down into the hangar bay.

She has a phone call to make to Sam's mother but can't bring herself to do it. Instead, she leaves the rooftop and slowly descends the stairs, a floor at a time: Twelve, Eleven, Ten, and so on.

On Seven, she passes by the doors to Steve's and Sam's apartments. Someone will have to clean Sam's out, and she knows, by default, that task will go to her – as his field partner, as his friend.

People die.

She moves along, past Sharon's and James's apartments. With Steve…incapacitated, cleaning those out will also go to her. She'll ask Rhodes to help with Sharon's.

Natasha goes to her own apartment. With a glance upward, her door  _clicks_ open.

When it closes, she presses her back flat against it and slides down to the floor, arms wrapped around her knees.

In the safety and privacy of her own space, Natasha sucks in a choked breath but refuses to cry. Eyes closed, she breathes, deep and slow.

Lemongrass. Cigarettes. Gun oil. Jet exhaust. Old Pepsi. Hair cream.

Him.

Natasha opens her eyes and sees.

A small stack of books. A laptop, not hers. Two men's jackets and a pair of dirty socks.

He hadn't moved in – but. He'd moved things in, a lazy, convenient decision at a time. She, on the other hand, had taken nothing to his space: too communal, too lived in, too his.

At least… At least he's dead, and not worse.

Small favors.

***

The hinges of the thick, heavy concrete door scrape open, ushering a burst of cold, dank air from the depths of a deep, dark hallway.

After a while, these hallways are all the same. This one in particular hasn't been used for a while.

Barnes draws his SIG Sauer, flips on the scope's light, and hands it to Sharon. Her fingers wrap around it, the light wobbling. It barely cuts through the darkness.

He steps them inside and pushes the door shut with his aching back.

As he walks down the hallway, and as Sharon swipes the light across the walls and the floor, he explains, "I saw a jet land here. We find it and get the hell out."

Sharon's response is a groan that almost sounds like "okay."

She's out of time.

In all his time with HYDRA, he hadn't seen many underground hangar bays for Quinjets. From what he has seen—mostly with SHIELD—they could be anywhere from two to twelve floors underground.

Barnes enters the nearest stairwell. With a quick glance down, he sees six, maybe seven subfloors at most. He doesn't hear movement or see any people.

The quiet, still oddness unsettles him.

No matter, he starts down the stairs, taking each step quicker than the last. The light from his sidearm darts erratically over the wall, ceiling, and floor, until it slips from Sharon's hand and clatters to the floor.

He leaves it, more concerned about the limp body in his arms.

His eyes don't adjust well to the darkness, something he attributes to his head injury, but he can see enough to find the door for the third sublevel.

In another endless hallway, he kicks open door after door, moving from one side of the hall to the other after each one. Every room and the next is dark and silent, and he's just able to make out their contents. Barracks, an empty armory, lab space – nothing to use, nothing to fly.

"Where…" Sharon.

"Inside the base."

At least she's alive.

Near the end of the hallway, already making a choice between going up to Two or down to Four, he kicks open the next door and could scream relief.

It's not the jet, but it's something good.

In the darkness, strips of tiny red lights blink and blink. Screens cover the walls, while rows of long tables host boxy computers, old field phones, and unmistakable radio equipment.

 _SLAM_.

Like a rookie, Barnes looks up. Of course, all he can see is a cracked ceiling, rather than the soldiers he knows are storming the first floor.

Time's up.

Barnes goes inside the room, closes the door, and deposits Sharon in the far corner. "Comm equipment. They're here."

The shine of her eyes reflects the flashing red lights. "SHIELD?"

"No."

Once again, her hand flops to her sidearm, fingers fumbling with the holster. "Power?"

"These rooms always have power."

Even old ones like this are still hooked into generators. This base is still used for something, and it'll have power.

The computer equipment is from the early 1990's, maybe a bit later, while the radios date to the '80's, at the oldest. He chooses the closest radio to the door, powers it on with the turn of a dusty knob, and sets it to SHIELD's specific ultra-low frequency.

He doesn't dare speak into it, lest HYDRA get too excited and cream their collective selves. Instead, he relies on his identification cipher followed by "SOS" clicked in age-old Morse code two, three, four, five times.

Above, he hears heavy footsteps and the  _lurching_  and  _slamming_ of doors. Barnes continues to send the distress call, while he draws his best combat knife with his free hand.

_SOS. SOS. SOS. SOS._

_We're here,_ he thinks.  _Find us now_.

_SOS. SO—_

The power cuts. The red lights disappear. The soft hum of the radio's electronics cuts into sharp silence.

Immediately, Barnes slides to the door. He presses his back against the wall, a centimeter from the door frame, drawn combat knife held at the ready.

This is the only certain future, and it arrives within seconds.

The door bursts open.

Barnes drives the knife into the neck of the first soldier through, and then into the second. Both of them collapse to the ground. He steals the second soldier's rifle.

Barnes spins into the opening, back kicking a third soldier into the hallway's wall, but not before grabbing one of that soldier's flashbangs. Totally exposed, he yanks the pin and tosses it at a cluster of five shadowed soldiers.

He doesn't bother covering his eyes. The flashbang flashes and bangs, and he catches a blip of something that terrifies him: a round black shield, blond hair, near the stairwell. It's not Steve, but it is, and his throat tightens, sinuses prickling.

_Will you like it. Will it feel good._

They're gonna do this.

Barnes runs straight past the five moaning and groaning soldiers, shooting them as he goes.

Nothing and no one is left standing between him and Steve.

***

With Maria still in a surgery the likes Tony never wants to see up close and in person, he sits by another bedside: a dangerous one, if not for the IV drip full of HYDRA's mix of animal-grade sedatives.

Something about this should include something about forgiveness, but that's, at once, unneeded and not Tony's to give. Word from Medical is that Maria won't be able to ever give it.

This somehow-pleasant, hodge-podge world of theirs has completely disintegrated, dust scattering in the wind,  _within minutes_.

Tony shifts his weight onto his left foot and re-crosses his arms.

What is he supposed to say to a war hero, a stalwart, a prisoner of war they hadn't been able to stuff back into his over-muscled, star-spangled bottle – who's medicated into oblivion and one dirty look away from being put into six-point restraints?

"No one blames you," Tony says, stealing four magic words out of his own playbook from a couple years ago. "But I really, really wish you hadn't done that."

Under his breath, hands scrubbing over and over his face, he whispers, "God damn it, Cap."

If Steve hadn't done that, they'd be down  _three_. Only three. Still terrible, still bad, but not  _five_. Not almost all of them.

Natasha's voice pops into the room via the intercom. "Tony, get to the hangar bay – ASAP."

There's only one way to take that: Bruce found the helicarrier.

Tony pushes off the wall and takes the four steps up to Steve's bedside. Tony doesn't reach for a hand or an arm but smooths out the scrambled front tuft of Steve's hair. "No one blames you."

_It's on us._

Tony gets down to the hangar bay.

Natasha stands squarely outside Quinjet Eleven: its ramp down, her red-nailed fingers tapping against her crossed arms. "What took you?"

Tony ignores that. "Where is it?"

"34,000 feet above Washington State – near Seattle. We picked up James' identification code and an SOS signal coming from some sort of ground installation in Washington's Scablands."

Shoulder-by-shoulder, they walk up the ramp into the jet. Tony consciously keeps his jaw closed, rather than hanging open in chilled surprise. They're alive, and they're  _close_  – backyard close.

Natasha drops into the pilot's chair. "Rhodes is en route from DC."

"Plan?" Tony asks.

"You two take the helicarrier; I take the base. Two med teams will be staged nearby."

That's a terrible sounding idea of a plan, but Tony isn't arguing today. He straps into the navigation chair, battling apprehension (they're forty  _long_  minutes out) with relief (they're only forty minutes out).

 _Hang on, we're coming_.

***

Barnes doesn't bother shooting at Steve. He remembers the helicarrier enough to know how that'd go, with the shield and ricochets and all. Shooting himself isn't how he wants to play this.

Nor does he want Steve to zap him into a worse situation in the other world. A faint blue glow tauntingly shines from under Steve's tactical vest.

In this dark hallway, he can't read Steve's face – and can't know if there's a way out of this that doesn't involve a brutal, mutual beatdown. He recognizes the naivete of the thought: thinks of the tortured body in the morgue, of Berlin, of the Cosmodrome, of the Northwestern Territories, of Latvia, and of everything his Steve had feared.

Sidearm holstered, fists up, Barnes doesn't wait for Steve to make a move, not when it could be a fired bullet, a thrown knife, or a spinning shield with a grenade stuck to its underside. He runs and steps in to Steve's space, not an inch surrendered, and throws the first punch – right-handed.

Steve brings up the shield. Expecting that, Barnes bats it clean out of Steve's grip with his left-hand, while his right hand connects not with Steve's face but with that blue glow.

 _Crack_.

The glow fizzles into darkness.

Steve hops backward, ducks under Barnes' left-handed punch, and lunges at Barnes' lower body. Barnes springs up into the air, kicks off the wall, twists, and drives a booted foot into Steve's defenseless back.

Steve smashes into the floor, bits of old concrete bursting into the air. Immediately, he rolls over, the metal of his shield dragging along the floor.

Barnes vaults off of Steve's back, twists again, and lands a few meters away from Steve, sidearm already drawn – and aimed.

It's a clear shot with no reason not to take it.

_Kill him, Buck._

Steve's shield hisses through the air, a second before it strikes Barnes' upper right thigh. If not for the Kevlar-weave of his pants, it would've sunk into his skin and probably severed a major artery. Instead, it  _clangs_ against the fabric; Barnes kicks it up, loops his right arm through the straps, and brings it to bear.

Steve flips up to his feet, a monster of a handgun aimed – but not fired. Steve knows better than anyone how bullets work against the shield.

There are over a hundred things he wants to say to Steve – apologies, pleas, requests, and offers. But the sound of his voice sets Steve off.

He can't offer  _come home_.

He can't plead  _Sharon's dying._

He can't beg  _don't do this._

Steve lowers the aim of the gun and fires. The one back home always complains that no one ever goes for his feet.

Barnes jumps, avoids the bullets, and heaves the shield into the side of Steve's head. It's enough to whack Steve into the far wall, enough for Steve's fingers to lose their grip on the gun—and enough for Barnes to get close enough to wrap his left arm around Steve's throat from behind.

He bites back more words, more apologies, and, eventually, swear words, as the back of Steve's head butts into Barnes' cheekbone, as the sharp corners of Steve's elbows brutally jab into Barnes' stomach, and as Steve maneuvers his right foot behind Barnes' left and tugs.

Down they go, together.

They land in a groaning, tangled heap, Steve on bottom. Steve sputters, one hand clawing at Barnes' metal skin, the other worming toward his fallen sidearm.

Barnes only tightens his arm around Steve's neck and buries his face into the shield sandwiched between them, thinking  _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry_ so hard that his skull might crack in half.

It just about does, when Steve flips them over and uses Barnes' own arm to smack the back of Barnes' head into the floor. Ears ringing, gold stars pouring through his vision, he's scarcely aware that the hologram flickers, plates winding down, the entire fucking arm going sufficiently haywire for Steve to slip through his once-unassailable grip.

The shield slides off Barnes' arm – and comes down at his throat, its razor edge as good as a guillotine.

Barnes rolls out of the way, missing it by a hair of a second. Although he uses the momentum of that roll to begin an easy slide to his feet, Steve is faster with a back-kick to Barnes' shoulder, with another swing of the shield that bashes into Barnes' left arm with a deafening  _claaaaaaang_ , with another kick, and one more swing of that shield.

Barnes catches the shield, pulls it and Steve close, drops all the way to his ass, and throws Steve over his head and down the hallway – near the comm room. The shield rips from Steve's hands.

He keeps the shield long enough to stand up, roll his left shoulder, and crack his neck, then fling it at the opposite wall. It embeds into the concrete by the stairwell. That's where it's going to fucking stay.

On his way to Steve, Barnes picks up Steve's Smith and Wesson 9mm—a POS, but who's keeping track—and field strips it into half a dozen pieces. He lets those pieces fall to the ground, like another time, in another place.

Steve dashes toward him, and they're on, tangled in a flurry of raw-power punches, vicious kicks, and brutal grabs. Steve's fists are rock-solid sledgehammers; his feet, size-14 whole saws.

One of those sledgehammers sails through the air. Barnes drops down, avoids the punch, and comes straight up under Steve's legs. He lifts up and throws Steve into the wall – more concrete crumbling, dust puffing.

Steve precision-bounces off that wall, ducks a strong punch, and roars into Barnes with a messy tackle. Barnes hits the other wall with another puff of dust, Steve's fist rapidly coming into view. Barnes moves his head out of the way of the strike and wallops Steve in the ear;  _crack!_

Stumbling backward, Steve groans. Barnes kicks him in the face, then spins and back-kicks him in the gut, then punches, punches, punches, punches, like this Steve is one of the Captain America inflatable bop bags formerly as seen on TV.

Sharon's bleeding to death; Steve won't stop; and he has to end this.

He has to end this.

He has to kill Steve.

The person he was in 2016 wouldn't have hesitated, not in this situation. Funny how long two years can turn out to be.

Steve grabs Barnes' right wrist and squeezes, fracturing bone. Steve follows up with a left hook that knocks Barnes clear back into another wall, another puff of dust, inconsequential pain blossoming across his cheekbone.

His ears ring with a high-pitched buzz and a rush of white noise. Stars and spots dart through his vision. Sweat and blood trickle down his face, coats his right arm. A headache pounds behind his right eye and swells behind his forehead.

He's not going to last forever.

He's not going to die on this floor. He's not going to let Sharon bleed to death. He's not going to let  _his Steve_  get that news – or walk into this base and find their bodies.

Steve plants a hard kick into the side of Barnes' right knee, then punch-punch-punch-punches Barnes' abdomen, until Barnes draws his CZ-75, shoots Steve in the gut point blank, and then slams the butt of the weapon into the side of Steve's bloody face.

Surprise and cold shock ripples across Steve's face. Barnes is close enough to see it, even in the dark.

Steve steps back, hands and eyes going to his gut – just like…

***

"Your orders are to install operational kill switches and—"

He tuned out the voice. Those orders weren't for him.

Obedient, he sat still and let them – just  _them_  – power off his left arm and affix two metal restraints to his right. He didn't mind.

He didn't mind when theyinserted an IV needle into a vein atop his right hand and secured it with tape.

He looked away, just with his eyes.

"My Michela rides her bicycle, all up and down the streets of Porto Torres."

"Nazarri, I don't fucking care."

"I think of her pretty pink nails – like morning glories. I miss—"

His eyes found a table and a magazine on that table. Two red words – VANITY FAIR – were partially obscured by a group of men; in the center of those men, a blond one wearing red, white, and blue and holding a round shield. Near the bottom of the page, Italian words written in black: "Il ritorno del Capitano America alla Cerimonia di apertura delle Olimpiadi Estive 2012 a Pechino!"

He translated the Italian to Russian, as he'd been trained to do. Two words stood out: Капитан Америка.

Капитан Америка.

Капитан Америка.

The name bounced around inside his head, around and around and around.

Капитан Амер – Captain America.

 _Captain America_.

It was almost a palpable shock to his system. The air seemed colder. The hum of computer servers and air fans seemed louder. Voices quieted into a mix of meaningless words.

The room had a damp, putrid smell to it, and it was wrong.

It was all wrong.

He shouldn't have been there.

 _Captain America_.

That wasn't right, either.

He stared at the face on the magazine cover, and that was wrong, too. The face was too big; the nose, too long; the body, too thick; the hair, not right. But he knew the person. It was Stev—

His thoughts melted. His body hummed. He tilted his head back, eyes closed, and floated above the room.

"What did you—"

"It stays sedated, unless you want to die. This is why we brought him to you. Insert the devices. Make sure they work, Mr. Nazarri. Mission critical."

He heard the sound of paper sliding across metal, followed by the sound of something being thrown into a metal trash can. Those sounds bounced around inside his head, stretching and looping, echoing and distorting, and he saw a white box truck with English writing on its side –  _Orion Block Ice_  – and heard a voice cut through the distortion: " _Damn it, Buck!_ "

His eyes snapped open. The ceiling was pitted, cracked gray concrete covered with rounded beads of ice.

A word tumbled out of his throat, without him even knowing it: "Steve."

"You don't have much common sense, do you?"

He looked toward that voice – past the iridescent blue innards of his arm, past a tabletop covered with silver metal plates – and saw a man bending over a trash can. Threat assessment: minimal.

The man – Nazarri – pulled the magazine from the trash can. With a glance over his shoulder, Nazarri walked the magazine back toward the table, but he didn't put it down. Nazarri held it up at face level, eyes flicking back and forth, before muttering "yes, yes" and tossing the magazine back into the trash can.

Nazarri sat down and picked up a pair of pliers. "Sergeant James Barnes. So, you are as much a ghost as I am."

It took a minute before it made sense, before an impossible feeling swelled under his breastbone: it felt like his muscles were squeezing into a ball, but he didn't say anything, because no one had asked for a report.

That was probably for the best, because only five singular words tumbled around in his head, none of them meaning anything in particular:  _captain america james barnes steve._

Those words didn't matter then and they didn't matter seven days later, after his memory of Nazarri and his lab were suppressed.

Those words didn't matter while he waited on the top of a bank building with a custom, modified SV-98 rifle. He was prepared for his target to arrive at the London Stadium, and he was prepared to assassinate the target during the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. His singular orders were to kill Captain America and to "make it messy."

Those words didn't matter when he received orders to abort – he didn't feel relief, or anger, or anything at all.

He didn't remember those words again, until a helicarrier was falling out of the sky, and Steve's face was bloodied and bruised under a relentless metal fist.

Four and a half years later, they haven't stopped falling.

***

Surprise and cold shock ripples across Steve's face. Barnes is close enough to see it, even in the dark.

Steve steps back, hands and eyes going to his gut – just like…

The helicarrier.

Shame, guilt, and above all, horrified fear wraps around Barnes, the years bleeding away one by one – 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, all the way back to April 2014.  _Please don't make me do this._

The one back home can't walk into this base and find them dead.

Barnes kicks Steve right where he'd shot him and makes another puff of dust.

He brings his weapon to bear, aims it at the point between Steve's eyes, and –

Waits too long.

Steve bats the weapon down, and his fingers painfully wrap around the front of Barnes' hair, throw him forward – and then that hand slams his head face-first into the concrete wall, again and again and again.

Agony ripples up through his forehead. Thin gold strands dance in his central vision; a black curtain slowly draws closed over both sides of his peripheral. Darkness spins around him, nausea crawling up his throat, and that pain—that  _pain_  in his forehead swelling bigger and deeper and –

_Steve._

A blade slides through his back from tip to hilt. It's less painful and more like a cold, prickly blanket wrapping around his skin, while his heart flutters, steals his breath, and spins the darkness in faster lightheaded circles, as good as being tossed into a blender.

_Sharon._

The world tilts.

The cold concrete floor meets his bare arm, his neck, his face.

An uproar of white sound deafens his ears, while puffs of hot breath creep into his ear - words being said that he can't hear. He's heard them before in another place, during another time; he doesn't mind not hearing them again.

_Steve._

The cold seizes into a flash of raging hot pain, as 230 pounds of weight transforms the knife into a fulcrum. His fingers dig into the decayed floor. His throat quakes with a desperate, frantic scream silent to his ears.

_Sharon._

Barnes rallies enough energy to twist his body out of Steve's grip and elbow Steve in the head with every remaining ounce of mechanical power in his left arm.

Steve stumbles backward, as Barnes scrambles to his feet, takes two turbid steps away - and collapses onto his side, knees buckled, head whirling.

He has the presence of mind to slide the knife out of his back; this time, he feels every serrated tooth tear through him. His vision dims, the hallway overtaken by encroaching dark splotches that devour the walls, floor, and ceiling.

 _Steve_. He'll find this.

A booted foot connects with his jaw. A rag doll, his body tumbles with the power of the kick, and then another. His eyes close, bringing such sweet relief that they never want to open again.

 _Sharon_. She'll die.

He drags his eyes open, in time to see a glint of metal ripping through the air, downward, down, down, down –

Barnes catches the blade between two hands, its tip cutting the skin above his carotid. Steve's salty sweat drips onto his face, while his bared, gritted, white teeth loom only centimeters away. His life depends on his left arm holding out, and he knows it's no longer a guarantee that it will.

Barnes brings his left leg up and tries to kick Steve away, but he's damn near powerless against Steve's thick body.

His left arm gives a fraction.

The knife dips into his skin.

A light flashes.

Three sure shots ring out:  _bang, bang, bang!_

A short, gurgling sound crawls from Steve's throat. Warm, wet liquid drips onto Barnes' right arm.

Steve collapses sideways.  _Thud_.

Still on his back, Barnes looks to where the gunshots came from: Sharon. She's sitting, back to a table, with her lighted sidearm aimed through the open doorway. She's the palest of pale, slit eyes barely open.

Their glances meet, before she closes her eyes. She's in no shape to do what needs done, beyond what she's already done.

Barnes pushes himself to his knees and drops next to Steve.

Fear shines in Steve's eyes, and Barnes knows a sliver of why – from a pulled-up t-shirt and a whispered,  _I thought it was you_. From a nuclear bomb dropped one cold October night:  _Buck, he thinks you…_

Blood speckles Steve's lips. His chest pumps out thin, frenzied wheezes, while his heart pumps out a growing puddle of blood. Barnes doesn't try to stem the bleeding. Death won't wait too long.

Barnes pulls the sidearm from Steve's hand and keeps ahold of it. Steve's eyes follow it desperately.

"Your mom's name was Sarah," Barnes says, breathless. It's not Steve – but it is. It is. "You used to wear newspaper in your shoes."

Nothing like recognition crosses Steve's face. It's all and only fear: fear of death, fear of life, fear of failure, fear of pain, fear of the known, and fear of the unknown. A well-worn memory of fireflies and stars and of wanting the end to come so, so badly flitters to the forefront of his mind.

Barnes drops to his ass and puts his hands in his lap. Steve's eyes trail his movements.

"I won't hurt you again," says Barnes, an attempt to provide something like peace. "And I won't let them…" Only in the movies. "…take you again."

Barnes closes Steve's eyes.

He takes a deep, painful breath.

"Are you okay?" Sharon wheezes.

It's not over yet.

He stands, hand balancing his waning body against the wall, and, before he talks himself out of it, fires four rounds into the lower back of Steve's head. It's basic anatomy: the cerebellum, the pons, the brain stem, the medulla. They go, you go, with no way back.

It's only something HYDRA told him to do in London in 2012. Something about "sending the world a message" and making it "messy." Then, the stubborn, stupid fuck blew off the fucking Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, all because Bucky Barnes had bought him art school.

HYDRA had kept their end-of-life investment alive only to kill Captain America – in 2012, in 2014. Only for that.

Can do and done.

"It's not him," Sharon says, as if she's convinced herself of that. Her voice is weak and her enunciation mumbled.

It's Steve's hair and Steve's face and Steve's hands and Steve's blood. It's fuel for nightmares and more sleepless nights, and it's more reason to not have food after six, because, if he does, it's the first to come out as the memories come in. It's another something they've twisted and taken and torn up and down.

He drops the expended sidearm. Behind his right forehead, that same old bubble of pressure builds and builds, throbs and throbs, pulses and pulses; if he touches it, it'll pop. It makes him want to curl up in a dark corner and sleep.

Can't do that: SHIELD's not coming. They have to find the jet and get a team here, before HYDRA comes to collect their dead.

His back screaming, muscles trembling, that dizzying pressure mounting behind his forehead, he pulls Sharon to her feet. Wordlessly, he takes her sidearm into his right hand, ignoring the poor functionality of his fractured wrist.

Sharon makes some sort of a dissenting noise, but that's all. As they move away from the hallway, trails of his own blood in his wake, he doesn't dare look at Steve's body, and he doesn't dare wonder when barbarity became an expression of love.

***

Head down, repulsors alight, Tony dives through thick, dark gray clouds and ignores sizzling cuts of lightning. Natasha and Quinjet Eleven fly on without him, a one-woman mission to save the last two hopes of SHIELD.

In the corner of his HUD, his real-time altitude counts down from 45,000 to 44,000, to 43,000. The helicarrier is at 34,000: still cloaked, still invisible, just for fun.

Iron Man Goes Splat isn't  _exactly_ the agreed-upon plan…he would assume, if there  _was_ an agreed-upon plan beyond  _attack_ and  _stay off comm_.

Altitude drops to 42,000 then 41,000 then 40,000. With 6,000 feet to go, he doesn't see a hint of a floating, gigantic ship: only clouds, lightning, rain, thin air.

Tony goes faster.

The helicarrier being here, in their world, over their city, for so long – it's not great news. HYDRA's making a move.

39,000.

38,000.

37,000.

Eyes focused on the façade of thin air, Tony maxes his repulsors – and anticipates the telltale ripple of the cloak.

36,000.

35,500.

Tony doesn't let up.

35,000.

34,900.

His stomach flips.

"JARVIS, give me something" perches on the tip of his tongue.

34,800.

There. About 500 feet below him, a translucent wave swells across a haze of somber clouds. Inside that wave, the blacktop of a helicarrier shimmers for a piece of a moment.

Without being prompted, JARVIS marks the distance and manipulates Tony's visuals to fabricate the blacktop, rather than sky. As he roars ever closer, he can perfectly see his position relative to the helicarrier – and he's not about to let up now.

Within seconds of seeing the carrier, he passes through the cloak, approaches the deck, and winds around parked Quinjets, stacks of cargo boxes, and dormant weapon sentries. The front of his suit scrapes and sparks against the blacktop.

Tony intentionally slows down and arcs upward. "JARVIS, identify all enemy combatants on the flight deck."

Scattered along the 800-meter length of the flight deck, eleven red markers pop onto his HUD. Tony opens his shoulder-mounted arsenal of mini-missiles and lets eleven of them loose, each chasing one of those markers.

Three seconds later, each of those markers disappear, while Tony dives back toward the deck and soars toward the northeast engine.

Large-caliber bullets  _plink, plink, plink_ against his suit, seconds before a mini-missile explodes against his left shoulder. A blistering, orange fireball blooms and overtakes his helmet, clouding his vision long enough for Tony to accidentally clip his right shoulder on the canopy of a jet.

As he tumbles and scrapes to the deck, a missile hits the jet, and another scorching fireball mushrooms. Glass, snarled sheets of metal, and bits of jagged fiberglass bombard his suit – and the main body of the jet churns side-over-side toward him.

Tony engages all four repulsors, shoots backwards against the asphalt, and back handsprings into the air. Readying to destroy the sentries, Tony pauses.

One of the sentries is already blown to tiny little bits. Rhodey spirals toward the other one, shoulder-mounted guns blazing.

"Welcome to the party," Tony greets over the comm. HYDRA knows they're here: no point in staying quiet about it.

"Just a fly in the ointment," Rhodey replies, much to Tony's amusement. "A pain in the ass."

"Glad you finally recognize that."

The second sentry down, Rhodey asks, "We doing what I think we're doing?"

"Oh: we're doing."

Tony bolts toward the ass end of the ship, weapons ready to tear apart the starboard engine. HYDRA won't crash the carrier here: they'll warp back to the other world, where he and Rhodey can blow the fucker into little bits and pieces. No question.

He gets there within seconds, hovers over the circular engine and its whirling thruster—the same kind that Tony once got bounced around inside, while fearless Steve tried to figure out electricity—and shoots three missiles straight inside.

Boom.

A mammoth fireball erupts from the housing, followed by the wailing of tearing metal. Done.

Across the way, he glimpses a flash of orange: Rhodey's taken out the forward starboard engine. The helicarrier itself shudders, then begins a slow, tell-tale tilt. If anyone with HYDRA knows a damn thing, they'll cut the two port engines and settle for a slow, hours-long drift, rather than what will amount to a sky-high, catastrophic capsize of the ship.

Well. Not that they're going to give HYDRA that choice.

Tony blasts away, toward the port engine, more than enough ammunition left to destroy these fuckers and then some.

"Tony!" Bruce's voice cuts into his ear. "We're picking up a strong radiation signal coming directly from the helicarrier."

They're warping.

"It's not a portal. It's a different signal."

 _What the fuck_.

"JARVIS," Tony orders, "full-spectrum scan of the entire helicarrier. I want everything. And tell me where that signal is coming from."

Tony shoots two missiles into the port engine, confirms the kill, and glances at the front of the ship – to see a sizzle-tailed rocket detonate against Rhodey's chest.

He watches the suit go dead: no eye glow, no thrusters, no control. The suit is limp, and it falls –

"Rhodey!"

– over the side of the helicarrier, close enough to the hull for Rhodey's helmeted head to violently slam into the edge of the flight deck –

"Rhodey!" No response. "JARVIS!"

"Colonel Rhodes is nonresponsive. His suit's power system is offline."

"Tony, it's coming from the bottom of the helicarrier." Bruce again. "It's strong. I think they're targeting Seattle."

Like the other world. Like Chișinău. Like the muddy town in eastern Washington. Like a plane full of people in Canada. Like a dozen more.

Bruce keeps talking. "JARVIS – do you see it?"

"Affirmative. Loading waypoint. The radiation charge is at an estimated 90% capacity."

The red waypoint pops into Tony's HUD: the belly of the helicarrier, seconds away. Another one loads without Tony asking: Rhodey, a blue icon, falling, falling, falling.

Rhodey or Seattle.

It's not a fucking choice.

***

Sharon wheezes something at Barnes, vapors coming from her throat instead of words. Her head lolls against his shoulder, her agency and control waning with every passing second.

His body leaching energy, he pushes them into another stairwell and checks floor after floor after floor.

Mindless, time turns to slow-moving sludge, and it revolves around only one concept:  _find the jet_.

Sweat prickles his forehead, while waves of icy cold wash over him, again and again.

"W-where?" Sharon whispers.

"Safe," he lies.

More stairs. More doors. More nothing.

From above, an ear-splitting rumble agitates the bits of old concrete scattered across the floor. Pieces and chunks fall from the ceiling. The floor shifts like a wave of sand.

With nowhere good to take cover, Barnes gets them into the corner of the stairwell. Sharon folds to the cold floor, and he puts his body over hers, his left arm curled around her head.

The floor violently trembles. Bits of pulverized gravel pop against his skin like popcorn. His gasps find not only stagnant air but clouds of suffocating, dry dust, even as chunks of the ceiling rain against his head and back.

The building is collapsing, right down on top of them.

Why not. Why the fuck not.

Like that, the shaking stops.

The dust settles.

Six floors of concrete don't collapse on top of them.

Coughing out dust, and desperately trying to suck in clean oxygen, Barnes straightens. Debris slips from his back and crashes onto the floor.

Sharon doesn't move. Her pulse is rapid, thready – not good.

He picks her up and moves down another floor.

The hangar bay's on Seven, the last fucking floor. Always Seven.

It's bright and shiny silver new and staffed by three people he shoots dead with a bullet each to the heart.

_BANG._

_BANG._

_BANG._

The base finally goes silent: not a footstep, not a word, not a  _clink_ , or a  _clank_. It's only them, for now. They're safe, for now.

A fifteen-year-old Quinjet with Pratt-Whitney engines sits skid-locked onto a hydraulic platform. The newer jets went with Rolls-Royce engines, built in partnership with Stark Industries. It's the easiest way to identify the age. For this jet in particular, the rudder on the vertical stabilizer is made of fiberglass, and that definitively dates it to 2003: the only model year where fiberglass was used for that component.

Sharon's dying, he's dying, and he's occupied by the age of a jet. Ha.

He's not relieved to have found it. He's not elated. On the floor, her blood mixes with his blood, and finding this jet is much like finding a bomb's detonator five seconds too late.

In the jet's cargo hold, Barnes gently lays Sharon on the grated floor. Her arms and legs bend and flop and flail without control or strength. Her head rolls as if her spine is the wobbly red Jell-O the Cafeteria serves every Wednesday.

He'd never understood what the hell "as white as a sheet" meant, until he'd stepped over bodies strewn about a quiescent German battlefield in the morning light. Sharon is as white as a sheet, her eyes, cheeks, and lips blending together into a featureless blob of skin – not dead, not yet, but soon.

In the cockpit, he skips preflight checks, fires up the engines, remotely opens the hangar door, and engages the jet elevator. The digital GPS screen loads from a black screen, to a red-and-white logo of a constellation; it's only looking at the blurred, incomprehensible dots that he realizes his eyesight is hazy.

The map loads. All he can make out is a large, bold word bobbing across a mass of ridged green mountains, strings of islands, and worm-like bands of primary-blue rivers: Seattle.

The elevator jerks into place on the surface. Rain patters against the windshield, all the morning sunlight devoured by gray storm clouds. The hydraulic skid locks disengage with a short, mechanical  _whir-WHIR_.

Hand slick with his blood, Sharon's blood, Steve's blood, he lifts the jet off into the storm-drizzled sky and blasts toward the safety of Seattle.

***

It's not a fucking choice.

Tony hurtles off the helicarrier and zooms head-first into the stormy sky, eyes only on that waypoint. He crashes through dense layers of clouds, races alongside sizzles of lightning, and maxes out every thruster, repulsor, and energy source he has available to him.

Save Rhodey, stop HYDRA: simple.

"Tony—there isn't time. Tony!"

Tony doesn't bother answering Bruce. There's time.

He breaks through another set of cloud layers and puts eyes on Rhodey. He's limp, suit still powerless, and tumbling through vicious gusts of wind.

In only a few seconds, Tony catches up with Rhodey and secures his body in a bear hug. "Rhodes – can you hear me?"

Rhodey doesn't answer. That's – not good. At all.

Tony blasts upward, back toward the helicarrier. New plan: stop HYDRA, get Rhodey to a Med Team, and, sometime in between, figure out what to do with the helicarrier. Easy. Simple. No big deal.

"Tony, it's—"

Bruce cuts to sudden static. There isn't time for Tony to ask what's going on, or even try to figure out what's going on.

There's only time for Tony to dodge a wide column of blinding, whirling, yellow-orange light. He darts and rolls to the side, but it's not enough, not when the light swells toward them – and then swells further toward them, further, and further, and further, and further.

Tony rockets easterly, as fast as his suit can go, out-flying the ever-growing edge of the light by  _inches_. Instinctually, he knows:  _that can't touch them_.

"JARVIS, reroute every system to thrusters. Everything."

"Rerouting."

One by one, systems go down: communications, his HUD, weapons, all of it. Incrementally, his speed increases by meters per second. He loses his ability to see the wave of light, and it's all he can do to  _hope_ , like a fool, that it's not coming for them faster than he's running from it.

_Go. Go. Go._

In front and only about twenty feet below him, a monstrous shadow crawls through a thick layer of clouds.

_What the fuck now?_

Tony doesn't dare slow down, not even when that monstrous shadow reveals itself to be a white and purple Airbus A380 for Intercontinental Airlines, little more than a hand's grasp away from him. It's going to fly directly into the column of light –

And it does.

He can only think of every crashed, empty airplane in the other world.

And then he thinks of all of the people far, far down below. All of the towns and cities.

And if – If.

He has to stop it, or die trying.

Decision made, Tony cuts upward, on a flight path that still takes him away from the light, but one that takes him closer to the helicarrier's altitude. He's pushed the suit to Mach 3.5, and it's enough – it's enough to outrun the light, enough to get back to 34,000 feet.

Tony arcs over and flips around, blasting toward the helicarrier. The problem, of course, is that it's still going to be cloaked, and he's not going to know where it is, and he might pancake himself and Rhodes straight into its hull.

As he cuts through the clouds, the hulking, dark gray helicarrier comes clearly into view: the cloak is down, three engines are billowing black smoke, and the column of light is shooting from directly under its belly, right where Bruce warned.

"JARVIS – bring everything back online. Now."

His HUD flashes back. Comms click back online, full of Bruce's panicked voice asking for him over and over again. His weapons cycle, inventory, and load.

"I'm here. I've got Rhodes," Tony says. "What's this light, Bruce?"

"Thank god! Don't go near it. Get out of there."

As Tony approaches the underbelly of the helicarrier and slows to keep a distance from that light, he thinks to tell Bruce, "No can—"

The light vanishes. The helicarrier devours itself in a flash of brilliant blue light – and it's gone, only a stormy sky left in its wake.

"It warped!" Bruce announces. "It's gone. Tony, are you there?"

"We're here. We're here."

Tony hovers long enough to confirm what he sees in front of his own eyes, then takes them down, down, down, fast and faster, wanting nothing more than to put his two feet on firm ground and get Rhodey's helmet off.

Nearly there, Bruce says, "Seattle's off the map."

"'Off the map,'" Tony repeats, bereft, confused, slow, all of the above. "What does that mean? JARVIS, satellite."

A live satellite feed of Seattle fills Tony's entire HUD.

His feet hit the soggy ground.

He lays Rhodey down.

Rain batters his armor.

He walks away, four, five, six rapid steps, while his heaving chest tries to break out of the suit. He doesn't know how that's possible, not when he doesn't think he's breathing.

His knees give. He falls onto all fours, armored hands sinking into the muddy earth.

He fumbles to deactivate his helmet. It melts away, taking away the satellite feed. He gasps in cold, wet air, before he heaves and coughs foamy bile into a stream of silty rainwater.

"What happened?" Natasha. "Banner?"

"News reports are coming in – we lost from Redmond to the coast at a 100-mile radius. Everyone's gone. Like the other world."

***

On Subfloor Three of a seemingly-abandoned HYDRA installation, Natasha finds Steve's black shield embedded in the wall, and then fresh bodies. Somebody has already been through here.

"Black Widow to Base. Bodies on Three."

"Acknowledged," Bruce replies. "Proceed. Med Teams are waiting."

Natasha steps over five bodies, the illumination from her sidearm's flashlight revealing neat, fresh bullet holes to their hearts. None of them are missing their service weapons.

The sixth body is barely recognizable but that of a friend's: Steve. Supine and motionless on the floor, he has three bullet holes to the chest, one to the gut, and more than needed to the head. Somebody wanted him dead.

It's not him. He's in New York, alive. She makes sure to remember that.

Natasha looks to her left, into the darkness offered by an open door, and finds two more bodies – both with stab wounds to the neck.

She shines her light into the room, sweeping it across rows of computers and radio equipment. Almost certainly, the ultra-low SOS message came from this room.

Natasha steps in and sharply turns, clearing the area immediately by the door. "SHIELD!" she shouts, a curt warning before she advances around the computer desks, sidearm aimed into empty darkness.

The room is unoccupied except for a pool of blood inside the entrance. Natasha crouches down and scans it with her phone: Carter, S.

They'd been here.

Back in the hallway, near Steve, Natasha shines her light across the floor, along a trail of even more blood. She scans that, too, and comes up with results for both Sharon and James.

They killed Steve and walked out of here, both of them injured.

"Black Widow, Base. Nine fatalities on Subfloor Three. Requesting immediate extraction for one fatality."

Her Steve or their Steve, she's not leaving him for HYDRA scavengers.

"Roger. ETA two minutes. Any sign of our people?"

Natasha works her jaw and answers, "Just blood. Still searching."

It shouldn't surprise them, not at this point. The entire mission was a massive failure. All of it.

Natasha unzips her jacket and takes off her undershirt, using it to cover Steve's face and head. Once, in a room deep under the Mojave Desert, this person had been her Steve. She watched him grieve, everything she said to him ignored, and then protected him from HYDRA.

This one hadn't been at all so lucky. None of them had, not in that world, and, now, not in this one. Death Valley is two years behind them, yet it's the headstone of their future.

"We have air activity just outside Seattle," Bruce reports, as calm as anyone could ask from the Hulk. "It's a Quinjet. An erratic Quinjet. It's not responding to hails."

No one responds.

"Tony?" Bruce attempts. "Tony, are you there?"

No one responds, again.

Not even two minutes later, a SHIELD strike team arrives with eight body bags and enough weapons strapped to their bodies to finish a war. Natasha leaves them to collect the dead, while she follows a trail of blood that traces to Sharon and James both.

Down the hallway, into the stairwell marked by a bloody handprint –  _Barnes, J._ , or so says her phone – Natasha swipes her light across tread after tread.

"Tony, do you have radar on that jet?" Bruce asks. "Tony? It's losing altitude fast. Tony?"

Down she goes, seeing thicker, fresher splotches of red. Until Subfloor Six, each landing door has a less complete handprint on it but no trails of blood leading through the doors.

_What were you looking for?_

The better question:  _What was more important than the communications room?_

Something big – and obviously recognizable from the dark stairwell. Otherwise, he would have explored every floor.

It's obvious: a hangar bay.

She finds it thirty seconds after thinking it: three dead technicians, a trail of blood leading to the edge of the hydraulic platform, and way up high, a wide-open bay door, the sky a deep, dim gray above it.

Natasha's fingers dart to her comm piece. "The jet is—"

"Tony, damn it!" Bruce exclaims. "The jet is dropping altitude fast. It's crashing. Tony!"

Natasha catches her breath, heart stopping. Her hand goes to her tangled stomach. It's not the time, or the place – but Maria is hurt, Steve is all but gone, Sam is dead, they failed over a million people, and James and Sharon are in that jet.

"Let it," Tony finally replies, flatly unconcerned. "No one's there."

"—them!" Natasha interjects, more than loud, more than shaken, more than done. "It's them."

In a second flat, Tony flicks back to life. "JARVIS, you know the drill. Let's fucking go."

***

_Hiiiiisssssssss–eeeee-oh–buzz–hiiiissssss–eeee-oh–hiiiisssss–_

Barnes turns off the jet's useless radio with such force that the knob breaks. It does nothing to ease the angry, frustrated tension that's about two seconds from snapping his head clean in half.

Even with failing, black-coned, star-sprinkled vision, he can see something is terribly wrong. He drops altitude almost fast enough to cause the jet to stall, but he knows the jet's limits better than he knows his own.

At 3,000 feet, he suddenly feels like his insides have been scraped out, leaving a wisp of prickly skin steeped in cold sweat. He might as well floor it and nosedive them flat into the pavement.

Vehicles don't move. Most of them have crashed into each other, buildings, hydrants, bridges – hell, off bridges.

White, frothy water gushes into streets from busted hydrants.

Light rail cars missed turns and careered into the streets, shattering glass, twisting metal, strewing bags and electronic devices across asphalt.

Fresh smoke drizzles from restaurants.

In all the discord, no chaos. No people - no running, crying, shouting. No sirens - no police cars or fire trucks.

The streets are empty at 1211 on a Saturday afternoon.

The radar shows planes, lots of them, but none of them gaining or losing altitude. Kilometers and kilometers away, across Lake Washington, plumes of thick, black smoke bloom into the air – the planes that had been landing and taking off, he assumes, like in the other world – but in this one and now.

Their world is gone.

_Can't be. It can't be._

It can't matter. Sharon's going to die.

He spots a hospital – northerly, across the lake, marked with a bright red rooftop helicopter pad. He doesn't know what the hell he's going to do there, how the hell he's supposed to keep her alive, but he has to.

Right hand looser around the flight controls than he wants—his numb fingers aren't working—he keeps descending, now down to a paltry 1,000 feet, then to 500.

Even the slight downward motion of the descent spikes his headache, that pressure behind his forehead building so much that his right eye feels droopy and twitchy.

He ignores that and worries more about landing. Gear engaged, he aims for somewhere close to the hospital that doesn't require him to land on wrecked cars, empty strollers, or toppled bicycles. It doesn't leave a lot of options.

He doesn't see a pulsing, too-quick blip on the radar, followed by another Quinjet. He lands the fucking jet  _hard_ : all skids at once, quick-and-dirty, good enough.

Lightheaded and dizzy, he doesn't remember going to the cargo hold, or dropping to his knees.

He barely hears his own voice say "Sharon, Sharon, c'mon, Sharon" over and over.

He barely believes that he can't see her breathing, while her pulse is barely perceptible at the same time her heart beats faster than a screaming mad wasp.

She's pale and cold, lips and fingertips blue.

All he has to do is somehow save Sharon: make her breathe, stop the bleeding, get her blood, get her fluids, get her temperature up, get her heartrate down, in something like that order. Nothing he knows how to do.

He barely feels the cold air blow past the skin of his arm and face, and he barely knows how it happened.

He barely hears the loud  _THRONG-THRONG-THRONG_ of footsteps pounding against the floor, and he barely feels a metal hand wrap around his right arm, and it could be anyone, anything, and  _that's okay_  because –

"Help her."

"Okay, yeah, well, you've gotta move."

Barnes looks up at Tony – sweat, exhaustion, dirt, and hollow  _emptiness_  on his helmetless face.

Barnes barely feels himself sit down, the world and Tony tilting as he goes. "I'm actually happy to see you."

"I'm actually surprised we ever let you fly a Quinjet. Privileges revoked."

The banter's okay, because an honest to god Med Team storms up the ramp and rings around Sharon like the rosie, all fall down. Tony steps out of the way and magically sheds his armor and a couple body sizes into a bracelet.

Tony talks into an invisible comm piece. "Bruce, get the other team out here. They're both bad."

Barnes blinks and Sharon's gone, the only evidence of her an insurmountable puddle of blood and the rapidly retreating backs of her doctors. Whatever they're saying gets lost in a haze of white static in his ears, even though he'd turned that fucking radio  _off_.

"Well. You look like shit. Med Team's on the way – be here in a few minutes."

Barnes doesn't remember closing his eyes, but they're closed, and it's dark, and his head is a live grenade, and Sharon's going to die. "I'm fine."

"More like delusional. But, hey, who's keeping track." A beat of silence – or minutes, or hours, or who knows. "That a stab wound or a bullet wound?"

His forehead  _throbs_ , and he's almost afraid to touch it, afraid it really  _will_  burst, but he puts his right hand over it, as if he can hold it in.

"Barnes?" Another beat, or minutes, or hours, or who knows. "Bruce, where's that team?"

A flash of barbed heat cuts through his body, and he decides to slide onto the cold floor, maybe curl into a ball.

"Hey, hey, no, wh—"

The pressure behind his forehead bursts.

***

Time's funny. Some days, it passes in a whirlwind rush, speeding by as the days turn to minutes. It's those days when Tony forgets to eat, to call, to email, to whatever to whoever. Part of why he hadn't been  _such_ a great CEO, but who's left to care.

Some days, it passes as slowly and aggravatingly as Steve trying to figure out a fucking iPhone – and, hey,  _don't buy Apple_.

_Steve._

Not a great analogy. Not anymore.

Watching CNN replay the same segments, waiting for "BREAKING NEWS" to  _really fucking be_ "BREAKING GOD DAMNED NEWS," puts time in the second category: slow, aggravating, unending.

Tony turns up the volume.

"…million people vanished within seconds. Meanwhile, authorities with the NTSB are still working to locate the whereabouts of twenty-nine commercial airliners…"

"Tony?" Pepper. "Tony, I know you're in there. Come out of there right now, or I'm coming in."

She can't get in.

Tony swallows half a glass of dark liquor and kindly pours himself a refill. By tomorrow, he has to find a way to be back on, to be something the rest of the world still needs.

Until then.

***

Natasha wraps her fingers around James' cold upper arm, careful to avoid his casted wrist, the purple-green bruising creeping all the way to his elbow, and the mass of IVs, including one for a transfusion, secured all along the underside of his arm.

She watches his face, childishly hopeful. His eyelids don't flutter. His brow doesn't crease. The EEG doesn't change.

She waits for his fingers to move: to clutch the unbleached, light green blanket, or to make an irritated grab for the oxygen cannula, or to reach for her.

Maria has a depressed skull fracture with an epidural hematoma, and she's medicated into an attempt at a healing, induced coma.

James collapsed in the back of a Quinjet from a cerebral aneurysm turned hemorrhagic stroke, and he's not waking up the way he should be.

What are the chances.

"James? We need you back. Wake up."

The EEG doesn't change. His eyelids don't flutter. His fingers don't move.

She tries something new. "You're home. You're safe. Sharon's alive."

Critical and in surgery, having a leg removed and nearly her entire volume of blood replenished: Sharon's alive for now.

Steve's on suicide watch.

Sam's dead, ashes waiting to be delivered.

Tony's drunk.

Seattle's empty.

"Rhodes is okay," Natasha notes. Any good news is good news. "Bruce is good. I'm here. James?"

The EEG doesn't change. His eyelids don't flutter. His fingers don't move.

Okay. That's okay.

"Just keep breathing. Please."

The medical bracelet around his wrist plainly states "do not resuscitate." Per James himself, they can shock his heart into a normal rhythm, but that's it. That's it.

"James."

The EEG doesn't change. His eyelids don't flutter. His fingers don't move.

***

Rhodes finishes dressing himself, then tugs off the medical bracelet around his wrist. The diagnosis printed on it says "concussion, moderate." The face that stares back at him in the room's mirror is swollen, bruised, and something beyond exhausted.

Even in a hospital bed, he's still been good for teleconferences, for somehow trying to mend an unfixable tragedy – or what's better known as a catastrophic failure.

Rhodes leaves the bracelet on the bedside table and lets himself out.

He passes Sharon Carter's window and glances inside. She's still critical, still colorless, still unconscious. She's alive, stable, and, most of all,  _here_. For now. He'll take what he can get, and he takes that.

He passes a private room without a window, and he stops long enough to press his hand palm-flat against the wooden door. Inside: Maria, whom medical science has assigned no chance of meaningful recovery.  _We're with you_.

He passes another window, where Natasha sleeps, curled up around the breathing body of another long-gone person. Rhodes wonders if Barnes knows that they made it back, that Sharon's alive, and that HYDRA's helicarrier is only so damaged because of their long-shot distress call.

That Sam's dead, that Steve wants to be dead, and that HYDRA vanished millions within seconds.

Dizzy and sluggish, Rhodes goes downstairs, exits through the public-access front door, and settles into the backseat of a waiting car. Nestled in the trunk, the ashes of a friend wait to be delivered to a grieving mother.

Tires smooth against the blacktop asphalt, the car pulls away, onward into the newly devastated world beyond their hollowed headquarters.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 16: The World's End._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I have a lot of comments to catch up on but please know that I deeply appreciate the time each of you take and haven taken to leave feedback and thoughts.


	16. The World's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “There is a fucking helicarrier out there. They already wiped out a city. They’re going to come back. And you’ll be…” 
> 
> It reminds Steve how temporary this day is, even on their best day, and that they’re not fighting for themselves, or even for each other. Even if they save the world, theirs has already ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: discussion of suicidal ideation. Depiction of major character injury.

The sun long risen, the northern sky is gray.

Past the debris piles peppering the shore, beyond skeletal structures, around a cluster of brick buildings, and down a curved, barren patch of land, a bleak, beige plot of land crumbles toward the northern shore.

At the shore's edge, blue water stretches as far as the eye can see. The bright orange sun glows from behind plumes of smoky, gray clouds.

The clouds are matched by plumes of dark gray smoke erupting from the engines of a helicarrier. Out, way far out, it slowly sinks through the cold, crisp air, mirrored by the crystal water, then slips past the northern horizon, broken in two.

He waits, in silence that becomes bitter, in hope that becomes brittle, and in fear that wades to the bottom of his gut.

Days slither past: coiling, constricting, cannibalizing.

He's going to die here, timeworn and soundless in the dim, gray haze, confined under a cage, staring at jagged boulders and polished stones.

He wants to die.

Until, one day, a burst of warm air chases away the cold. Songbirds flutter and sing. Rolling, white clouds stack up high in the blue sky. Yellow-orange leaves crinkle and scatter with the wind.

Ahead, up on a cobblestone path lined by tulips, a red-haired woman like Natasha waits.

Eyes closed, he breathes in deep: the earthy, autumn scents of the leaves, the flowers, the air, the grass refilling him with life.

The grass.

Eyes open, he figures the woman like Natasha can wait. He hops the black, wrought-iron fence, tosses his dusty gear to the ground, and flops into the long, scratchy blades of fresh green, green grass, greener than Bruce on a bad, bad day.

As the sun warms his face, he laughs and hears his own broken sound join the glorious chittering of the birds.

_Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep._

_***_

_Beep, beep, beep, beep_.

Lemongrass. A too-soft blanket in his tingly right hand. Pearl Jam and steady beeping. It's SHIELD.

Barnes opens his eyes, his muddled brain expecting to come face-to-face with the cold metal floor of HYDRA's Quinjet. Instead, he sees a beige wall, a blank flatscreen TV, and a whiteboard that lists names for a doctor, nurse, and aide. Under those names, the spot for "fall risk" is filled in with "high."

_What…_

Fingers drag through his hair. It feels good, real good, until he cues into something else: searing, hot, throbbing pain inside the right side of his forehead.

As quick as he can, he clumsily bats away the hand from his hair and brings his right hand—it feels tingly, numb, not there, and it shakes—up to his forehead, as if he can push it all away.

"James. James."

Already in the bed, Natasha wraps her arms around him, eases him onto her shoulder, and pulls his head to the side. He doesn't fight her, or even care what she's doing, not while a jagged, serrated, red-hot knife plunges back and forth into his head.

A sharp IV needle pierces through the skin of his neck. Strong, sure fingers tape it into place. Someone tells him what they're doing, speaking as quickly as their fingers work, but he doesn't catch anything except "lost arm access" and "fentanyl."

He floats, his entire body at once both numb and singing with buzzing bumblebees. Although the headache and pain doesn't ease completely, the knife stops stabbing, and the fire stops scorching.

Unsure, he drops his hand, waiting for the sharp, searing pain to flare, but it doesn't. Another IV line and a bunch of tape pull at the numb skin of his arm. "What…"

"What do you remember?" Natasha asks.

"On the—"

He can't find a way to say  _Quinjet_. The word is there, right there, but he can't figure out how to say it.

He feels his right eye pull into a twitch.

Maybe it's the fentanyl, but everything goes numb. Everything.

This only took five years longer than HYDRA expected: end-of-life.

"I got hit with wreckage," he manages.

To his ears, his words sound clear, coherent, correct. He's terrified they're not.

Natasha moves so they can see each other. Her answer is a small, worry-filled nod. "It's been a long time coming. You know that. How are you feeling?"

He looks past her, sticking his eyes on the whiteboard, and finds that his peripheral vision is gone – both sides of it. That'll get him killed real, real quick.

He doesn't even care. "Sharon?"

"Alive, critical. Asleep. We had bets about who'd wake up first. People are going to be very unhappy with you."

That's supposed to be something like humor, only she can't muster it through the dark cloud hanging over her head.

"What was it?" he asks.

"A burst aneurysm, a stroke, and an EEG showing chronic absence seizures."

 _End-of-life_  cycles through his head: HYDRA had known, had expected this.

"It's been four days. Cho didn't know if you would wake up; your body doesn't do what it's supposed to. And you're not careful."

 _You can go anytime you want to_  sits on the tip of his tongue. Maybe he can't figure out how to say that, either. Maybe he doesn't want to.

He moves his gaze so that she pops out of his central vision. "This is what got the other one. It's not gonna get better. I want to go…"

 _Home_. He can't figure out how to say  _home_.

If only irony could kill.

***

Long after sunrise the next morning, comes another briefing: all uninjured, living, stable Avengers required. Natasha scribbles a hole in a piece of paper and rests her eyes on her tablet's screen, waiting for updates from Medical.

It's only her, Rhodes, Bruce, and Tony. Not exactly what she'd consider their A Team.

Rhodes calls the briefing to order with a less-than-authoritative, "Okay. It's been five days. Updates?"

Natasha drops her pen and massages her temples, done with the tap-and-dance of having it all together.

Even with Extremis, and even if Sharon chooses it, she'll have months of rehab ahead of her, before being anywhere near field ready again.

It's a shame they don't know how Extremis works for brain damage: Maria's gone, Steve's been long gone for a long while, and James finally caught up with himself—and, once he learns about Sam and Steve, he's as good as gone.

Natasha sidesteps around all the lost people and all the costly emotions that come with them. "Cho upgraded Sharon to serious. James is…"

Pulling every hat-and-rabbit trick he's got to get out of Medical. Cho might do him a favor and kill him.

"…not great without a lot of medication. Cho doesn't know how permanent," Natasha says, neatly avoiding that she thinks he's going to leave.

"No one calls him that," Tony complains. "It's weird."

"Did anyone manage to get ahold of Thor?" Rhodes asks, purposely louder than Tony. Uncommon agitation tinges his voice.

"Yeah, so," Bruce laughs, and that laugh is enough to tell them all what he's going to say, "I sent him some emails, but my real money's on the carrier pigeon. How many thousands of years do you have?"

Tony flicks a ballpoint pen past Bruce's head. "Why don't you go smash something?"

"Sure, where'd you park?"

Tony uses a manicured middle finger to –

"Guys," Rhodes warns, and then waits for them to either fall in line or suit up. "How about Barton?"

Natasha doubts it. "He won't leave his family, especially now. Plan for us being it."

Rhodes absorbs the information with a bobbing nod, almost as if he'd rather be banging his head against the table. Not a bad idea, even with his concussion.

"Well, let him know the world's going to end, but as long as he's with his family, who cares," Tony grouses. He means every word.

Natasha pins Tony with a cold gaze. "I'll give him your regards."

"Please. Do."

With another depreciated laugh, Bruce spins a finger in the air. "This is great. Go team."

Rhodes cuts through it all. "Have you two figured out why they targeted Seattle? Was it a mistake? A strategy?"

"It was a test," Tony replies, finally ready to approach this as a briefing rather than a standoff. "The installation where we found the other Rogers was inside a test range and shielded with the same shit we're shielded with, which is why Romanoff, Barnes, and Carter are still alive."

Good to know, Natasha supposes.

"And it failed," Bruce interjects, an ironically calm and welcome voice. "If they're using the Insight algorithm, it failed. But we know that it successfully targets only organic humans."

"Rather than non-organic?" Tony needles, although Natasha  _knows_ he knows what Bruce meant.

"Seriously: where'd you park?"

Torn between nodding agreement and firing everyone, Rhodes looks to Natasha. "You?"

It's a fair theory, but that's all it is, and it's all they have. "We only know that they have an operational helicarrier equipped with machines capable of killing hundreds of thousands at a time. Whether it was a test or an attack, does it matter? How much time did you and Stark buy us?"

Rhodes looks to Tony and Bruce.

Bruce always goes low. "A couple more days."

Tony always goes high. "At least two  _more_  weeks, at minimum. We destroyed three engines. They would've had to land it, if it didn't flat-out crash."

Bruce leans forward, face scrunched up. "You still really think it crashed?"

"You still really think it'll take those idiots a couple days to fix that damage? It would've taken real SHIELD at least two weeks."

Natasha takes those as hard limits and figures the time they have is somewhere in-between, with three field-approved Avengers left to make up the difference. They  _could_  take Bruce, she supposes, and give the Hulk free reign of the helicarrier. It would be entertaining, at least.

Rhodes makes a note on his tablet. "All right. I'm taking off to the Pentagon. When I get back, we're making plans. Find that helicarrier. Natasha, check with Barton—convince him—and get me a report on Barnes."

For a moment, Natasha thinks to kick the wasp nest by announcing that James won't stay, Clint won't come, and they're far, far better off planning for who they're going to realistically have for when Tony and Bruce find the helicarrier.

She keeps it to herself and heads to Medical, preparing herself to kick a different nest.

One that James is stomping to death.

"I'm.  _Fucking_. Leaving."

Eyes heavy, with a headache gnawing behind her forehead, Natasha waits outside the door to his room and listens.

On a good day, Cho barely bears James. Today's not a good day.

"You suffered internal injuries from a serious knife wound. That knife wound has yet to heal."

After five days. The serum isn't doing its job.

"Meanwhile, you suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage secondary to a ruptured aneurysm—"

"You've told me this," James interrupts. "I don't care."

"—which is fatal in 40% of cases. You are lucky you didn't die in the back of the Quinjet. You  _may still_ experience a life-threatening vasospasm—"

"Don't care."

"—which occurs in 70% of patients. But at least you haven't experienced a personality change. I suppose we'll have to count that as a good thing, unless you would prefer a second opinion."

That hardly trips up James. "Where's the AMA…thing."

Cho sighs. "You're lucky we weren't forced to perform a craniotomy. You need to be monitored and observed. In any other hospital, you would still be in the ICU for  _at least_ two weeks, not to mention undergoing rehabilitation to remediate the neurological and physical deficits."

Natasha exhales her own sigh. He's going to say…

"Fuck you."

Too bad he hasn't forgotten how to say "fuck."

"Agent, you are not leaving. It is an order."

"Is it?" James wonders, his tone nothing but challenge. "Okay. Bye."

Natasha steps inside, hands up, conciliatory. She could smack him, for how he's behaving.

Only: he doesn't know about Sam, Steve, or Maria. He barely knows about Sharon. He's going to dissolve.

With that in mind, Natasha completely ignores him and how, for all his complaining, he's still fully lying in bed, slathered in IVs, blankets covering his legs.

Natasha looks to Cho. "Can we talk?"

Teeth gritted, Cho nods.

***  


The walls aren't necessarily thin, but Cho and Natasha aren't being necessarily quiet.

"He's not well. My medical order is for him to remain here under medical supervision."

With a tone like that, Cho might end up murdering him. That'd be one way out of this mess.

"He won't. You know that." Natasha sounds equally as long-suffering, as if she wants nothing to do with this. "What do I need to know?"

"The anti-seizure medication we're giving him will metabolize by the end of the day. I'll give you a bottle of pills. If he doesn't take them, he will—"

Barnes tunes them out, so fucking tired of this. If he doesn't take them, he'll fall the fuck apart even more. If he does take them, he'll puke his guts out and not be able to keep his fucking eyes open. Choices.

A few minutes later, looking none the happier, Natasha drops a bag of clothes on the hospital bed. "You need to stay. You're not well."

From anyone else—like Cho—those would be pretty good fighting words. But it's Nat, and she's right.

He's okay being wrong.

"I'll be fine." Barnes feels the lie in every sharp, jagged ache that throbs in his back. It'd be great if  _that'd_ been the side to go numb. "I'll even lay down."

"Promises. Cho is very pissed at you. Leaving AMA – really?"

The bag only contains a t-shirt, socks, and sweatpants, hardly real clothes. Also: no shoes. Subtle hints to  _stay the fuck put_. He's not arguing about anything except having to stay here any longer than he already has. He wants to go home, so he is.

Barnes pulls on the pants, one painstaking leg at a time. Back muscles are important or something.

Natasha watches him with crisp eyes, not twitching a finger toward trying to help – which is fine, but the silence is unsettlingly. Sam, at least, would still be shoveling shit at him. It's weird he hasn't come by. Steve, too.

Barnes tugs the shirt over his head, right hand numb and trembling, fingers not quite fumbling. He wonders how many seconds he'd lose pulling a trigger, or gripping a knife, or making a fist.

Going home might be beer and TV with Sam, with Steve tapping at his drawing tablet. He'll even buy the pizza.

"Where's Sam?" he asks.

By the time he's got his arms through the shirt's holes, Natasha's expression has silently shifted to provide the answer.

He fumbles getting the shirt down his torso. He accidentally hits the stitches there with his left hand. He barely feels the sting of pain.

People die. People god damn  _die_.

"Nine went down right before you. No one survived."

The oxygen sucks out of the room.

After the fiasco with Natalia, he had to kill at least one of his trainees, often more. HYDRA always seemed to know the most afflictive ones to pick, even ones he'd thought too prized to sacrifice. HYDRA's game was a bit longer than his.

Given that, he doesn't know why his eyes sting, why his chest hurts and heart skips. People die, and he'd learned better than to care.

_Steve._

Barnes slides off the bed, socked feet cold and shaky against the white tile floor. "Where's Steve?"

Steve's the one to worry about, but his concern is too late, or so says Natasha's newly dismayed expression.

Feeling sick, Barnes amends his question. "What did he  _do_?"

"He backhanded Maria into a wall. She has a serious brain injury. He's on an involuntary mental health hold and suicide watch."

Barnes sits back down and rubs his eyes with his left hand. His right eye twitches. " _What._ "

Sam died.

Sharon might too – still serious.

Maria's hurt.

Steve's spiraling.

The world ended.

A strange, vacant feeling overtakes him, as numb as the right side of his body. He drops his hand and looks up at Natasha. "Are you—" He loses the word and finds another, "—all right?"

He doesn't know if he's asking out of concern or to find an emotional bearing.

"People die," Natasha says, but she doesn't shrug, or even sound halfway convincing.

She's not okay.

He stands up again and embraces her, because that's the right, expected thing to do. Her hands clench his shirt into bunches, and her body is a welcome, soothing warmth against his, but that strange, hollow feeling doesn't fade.

Sam's dead.

***

After James goes home, with JARVIS under strict orders to notify her if he wanders anywhere, Natasha slips into Maria's room.

Bruce glances at her in greeting. "I feel like I shouldn't have time for this."

Locating the helicarrier is a priority. Natasha knows Bruce has scans running; Tony, too. "She would appreciate it."

"I really don't think she would, is the thing."

Natasha stops at the foot of the bed, not intending to stay for long. Nothing has changed for days: still intubated, still covered in wires, still with her head shaved and bandaged in white gauze, still medicated into a protective coma. Prognosis: still unfavorable.

 _We need you_ , Natasha thinks at Maria.  _Now more than ever._

A fool's request that the world can't afford to entertain.

"Any sign of it?" Natasha asks, although it's only been two hours, tops, since the briefing.

Bruce shakes his head "no." "Tony finally finished an identification algorithm. The minute it warps here, we'll know. Not that we're ready. Hopefully we find it before it finds us."

Hope is for the same kind of fool, and the world's just as broke.

"Their time technology – if we take it intact, we could use it," Bruce says, tone hesitant but certain. "We've seen it reverse death. Maria, Barnes, Sharon – it'd work."

Not for Sam, with hardly most of him recovered. Not for Steve, unless they're willing to steal two years of his life. Not for their other agents and coworkers. But for those three…

Natasha swallows and nods, agreeing that it's a possibility, with no idea about the ethics, morality, or risk to the world. It'd be worth it.

"Only have to figure it out," Bruce adds.

"Only have to have a successful mission," Natasha counters, knowing that they'll be lucky if they can neutralize the helicarrier, let alone successfully take it intact. "We barely have the people. But it's an idea."

Bruce bobs his head in slight agreement. "It's an idea."

Natasha sweeps her eyes over Maria and leaves her with Bruce.

She goes down the hallway, through a familiar door marked "Mental Health Services," and checks in with Naceri.

"How are you?" It's a question borne of habit more than genuine interest.

Naceri turns in her chair and rolls past her desk. Red splotches streak down her cheeks; her mascara gunks up under her eyes. It's been five days to grieve for Sam, five days to move on, but it feels more like the world has frozen over.

"Here. You?"

"Here," Natasha agrees, then quickly switches to the point of her visit. "Can I see him?"

Ambivalence shows, loud and clear, on Naceri's face. "You can try. It would be good for him. But he—" Naceri sighs. "I heard Barnes was discharged. Can he come?"

"'Discharged' is a strong word." With naïve optimism, Natasha considers the request. "Is Steve asking for him?"

The way Naceri hesitates says everything. "He doesn't believe Barnes and Carter are alive. Seeing it is believing it."

"Sharon isn't out of those woods. Not yet." Or for a while. "I'll talk to James today."

Naceri thanks Natasha with a tight, half-grimaced smile. "Let's go."

Outside Steve's room, Naceri raps her knuckles on the door. A slim window allows for observation; Natasha refuses to look through it.

"Captain, Agent Romanoff is here to see you. Can she come in?"

After a few seconds, Steve's voice responds with a clear "no."

Naceri looks to Natasha with finality. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I'll talk to James. He'll come."

Natasha leaves Medical and goes to Ten, spending over four hours covering three of James' training classes. At the end of them, all Natasha can think is that he's been building SHIELD a terrifyingly, efficiently competent army, like all the ones he'd built for HYDRA.

But not in time to put them on a helicarrier and expect them to be anything except little fishies in a barrel.

Afterward, she eats a late, cold, lonely lunch on Six, then runs two long briefings for two reconnaissance teams scheduled to investigate a couple pieces of odds-and-ends intelligence. The helicarrier is the priority, but, until they find it, missions go on. They might catch a break on one of them.

Before going home, Natasha goes back up to the Cafeteria, eats a quick dinner, and takes a few sandwiches for James. She doesn't think he'll have the stomach to eat them.

At half past 2000, Natasha slides those sandwiches into the refrigerator and finds James asleep on her couch, bare left arm sticking straight out, slatted elbow locked. She catches enough of a glance to see that he's deep asleep, comfortable, "his" gray blanket half on the floor next to his socks. On the coffee table, the cap for the anti-seizure pills sits separate from the bottle.

Deciding not to disturb him, she quietly crosses through the living room, toward the bedroom.

"Nat?"

Mid-step, she stops. He's a light sleeper.

"Don't go."

She turns, hears fabric rustling, and sees the top of his scruffy-haired head pop up over the back of the couch. His face is puffy, eyes drowsy, and he's going to fall right back to sleep, she knows it.

"Go back to sleep, James."

Today began at 0300 and has been long, exhausting, and she wants to lay down—only for a few hours. And, so, that's what she does: in the bedroom, shoes kicked off, pants a wrinkled heap on the floor, her phone in her hand.

" _How's the family?"_ she texts Clint, bait for the inevitable request of "come back"; if he's smart, he won't answer.

She hears uneven footsteps: a slow limp across carpeted floor. After about seven seconds, she moves her gaze to the door.

James finally makes it, his right hand awkwardly gripping the doorframe, breaths harder and harder to come by. The idiot refuses to do anything he's told.

Her phone vibrates. She looks at the message from Clint:  _"Don't even ask."_

Unsurprised, Natasha tosses her phone onto the night stand. That's one mission accomplished. "Get in here," she says.

James limps, while she pulls her shirts over her head and unclips her bra. She glances up in time to catch him dragging his eyes over her bare chest.

Natasha folds the top cover and sheet down, so he won't have to worry about it, and pretends not to watch him sit measuredly on the bed, take a deep breath, and tense up.

He'll never ask.

On her knees, she takes him by both armpits and slides him backward. Her face hovering over his, she smirks. "Ask, next time."

It's barely a moment. He can't keep his eyes open, even with her breasts inches from his eyes, and even with her lips inches from his.

He straightens, painstakingly moving his body and legs in line with the bed, and curls up around her. The skin-to-skin heat of his body, cut by the cool metal of his arm, settles her jittered nerves like nothing else.

Until she sees the four fentanyl patches he must have voluntarily chosen to stick to his own arm.  _Four_. His right arm still has bruises from the IVs – bruises that should have healed hours ago, like the ugly purple lump on his forehead and the still-raw stab wound in his back.

His serum can't keep up. She tells herself that's good, that it's working on remapping and healing his brain.

Natasha pulls the covers up around them, yanks a pillow under her head, and drifts to the sound of his steady, deep breaths, the heat of his face pressed into the nape of her neck.

"I love you," he usually says, never in Russian, but not today.

She never says it. She won't now.

Some odd hours later, she wakes to a hot, sweaty mess of a bed and the sound of desperate, deep retching in the closed-door bathroom.

Dignity trumps love, and she only sits up, arms wrapped around her legs, hands itching to cover her ears. She waits, letting the darkness devour the stretched, endless time minute by minute.

The toilet flushes. The sink water runs. She hears his whispered, "God damn it, god damn it, god damn it, god damn it."

Finally, he comes out, face shining with cold sweat even in the dim, window-filtered moonlight. He takes a second to recognize her sitting up.

"Nat?"

"James."

He lays back down, curls up beside her again again, and protectively covers the right side of his forehead with his shaking hand. A headache – and she has no idea if it's one she should worry about or not.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

The throwing up; the headache; or maybe the nightmare that dampened his side of the bed with sweat – any of it is fair game.

A long pause. "No."

Natasha suspects she already knows about the nightmare. "We have Rogers' body in the morgue. Who killed him?"

He struggles to push himself up. He doesn't ask, and she doesn't help, going so far as to intentionally look away from the vulnerable pain on his face. After a bit, he manages to prop himself against the headboard. It's not until his labored breathing slows down that she looks at him again, outwardly more patient than she feels.

"Sharon." He leaves a clearly unstated "but" hang in the air, though not for very long. "Then I shot him in the head."

Consistent with the autopsy.

"I know it wasn't him, but it was. It was him." He drops his face into his hands. "I can see it. Smell it."

"I was there when you committed suicide. I can see it and smell it." It's been over a year. She's talked about it with no one at all.

Once and again, James curls around her, arms circling her lower waist, head rested on her hip, nothing else said.

Natasha glances at the bedside clock: 0036. Steve might be awake, and the medical staff might let James in to see him. "Do you want to see him?"

He curls tighter. "Not tonight. Tomorrow."

Natasha doesn't tell him that it's already tomorrow. His voice is fading, and his body is loose enough for her to know that he's already dozing off. With any luck, he'll sleep straight through to the next tomorrow and never know the difference.

Natasha pulls the bed covers up over his legs and most of his body, plays with his shaggy hair, and dreads all that is to come.

***

_Knock, knock!_

Steve doesn't look to the door. Without a word of permission from him, Naceri opens it and comes inside, closing and locking it behind her. He can hear the quiet sounds of two guards standing watch outside.

"Good morning, Captain," Naceri greets, her tone normal and bright. "How are you today?"

He doesn't have an answer for her, not for that. "How's Maria?"

And she doesn't have an answer for that. "Agent Barnes is here to see you. Would you like that?"

A lot of days ago, Natasha had buzzed by and told him that Bucky and Sharon were mostly alive. "No guarantees," she'd warned, adding, "I think you deserve the honesty."

She'd come back yesterday—or the day before yesterday, he can't keep track—and he hadn't wanted to hear anything else. Not about Sharon. Not about Bucky. Not about Maria. Not about Sam.

"Captain?" Naceri prompts. "You don't have to see anyone you don't want."

He doesn't believe her about that, but what the hell. "Sure."

"Okay." She raps her knuckles on the door.

It opens, and she rolls out as Bucky walks in. "Hey."

Seeing him, Steve realizes that he'd actually prefer not to see any of them. It's over. It's all over.

Bucky doesn't get far past the door. He stops at a small round table, a hand placed on top of it. Sweat beads on his forehead. Nerves, maybe. "Steve?"

Right. He has to talk. "How is she?"

Bucky's eyebrows dip, while his eyes search the air. "Um. Sharon's sleeping; they think she'll be—all right now." Bucky doesn't hesitate for the next part. "Maria's bad."

Steve closes his eyes and doesn't think his stomach will ever stop dropping. Even if Maria lives, she'll—

Steve breathes, three seconds at a time, but the hot, creeping feeling of ashamed despair only grows.

Bucky has nothing to say and doesn't move any closer; even in the same room, he might as well be a hundred miles away. Steve can't blame him.

"How—" Steve's voice breaks, paper thin. "How are you?"

He saw a bad bruise on Bucky's forehead; the slow, measured limp is hard to miss.

"I'm fine. What do you need?"

An ugly, scared, devastated voice replies  _a hole in the head_. He'd tried that and can't have shoes or strings or a razor to shave with or a butter knife to eat with, as if any of that could make a dent in his serum. A gun or a tall enough cliff would work.

He presses his palms into his eyes and is too tangled in his own thoughts to hear Bucky's footsteps. The heavy dip of the mattress announces Bucky's presence, but nothing announces the firm hand that rubs warm, pinched circles along the back of Steve's neck.

Like old times.

Steve's eyes prickle; he presses his palms deeper. "After Insight, why'd you never do it?"

Bucky doesn't try a bit to hide his loud, tired sigh. "Do what?"

Sam always said to be direct about it. "Kill yourself."

Bucky keeps rubbing. In the old times, he would say something like  _c'mon, don't be like that_. They never really had those times, Steve thinks, not with a future like this.

"You," Bucky answers, and, although his voice is hoarse, it's at least strong. "I couldn't do that to you. Don't do that to me."

Tears saturate Steve's palms, and he doesn't dare let Bucky see them, not even when Bucky pulls him into a one-armed hug.

"You know what I've done, to people here. You  _will_  get through this. You hear me?"

If Steve speaks, he'll sob out loud, and he refuses to do that. He gives Bucky a single nod that could mean anything Steve wants.

It's been years, and it only gets better long enough to trick him, all of them, into dangerous complacency.  _I know why you keep leaving_ , Steve thinks.

Bucky doesn't end the hug; he only makes it tighter. "I'm here. You're not doing this…by yourself."

Steve nods again, something desperate, and leans into the hug, while tears run down his arms.

***

Sharon hears the slow, steady sound of  _beeping_. Her throat is sticky-dry and her lips cracked. Something stiff and uncomfortable is wrapped around her leg, while the rest of her body buzzes with what must be some sort of pain reliever.

All of it together means  _safe_.

The last thing she remembers is killing Steve, and then four more gunshots, with a long way to go until anything like  _safety_.

Sharon opens her crusty, gritty eyes to a blurry, blue wall and a tall ceiling. It looks remarkably like Medical at SHIELD headquarters.

She looks to her left and sees an indistinct, thick-bodied person sitting near the corner of the room. The hair is dark, so it's not Steve. Not Stark or Sam or Rho—

"How are you?" Barnes.

"Hey," she responds. It's a greeting, a question, and an assurance, all wrapped into one croaked word. "We're home?"

His dark-haired blob of a head nods. "Yeah."

Her vision still doesn't allow her to see his expression, but his tone is flat, like it belongs to a cardboard cut-out of a human.

Sharon pushes herself up, shifting her body into a sitting position. Even that small movement spins the room and turns her stomach . Her fingers dig into the mattress and curl the white bedsheets. Her arms tremble. She locks her jaw and focuses on the crosshatched plastic IV tape on the top of her hand.

A cold metal hand that looks like skin touches her shoulder. "C'mon, lay down."

She glances up and shakes her head "no." Another surge of nausea trickles up her throat.

He backs off – only a single step backwards, but his hand and advice gone.

She gives her body time to settle, then looks under the blankets at her leg. Her thigh is wrapped in a bulky, beige bandage, and then – a round, dressed stub instead of her knee, calf, and foot.

Not a surprise but – a devastating shock.

She sucks in a breath.

She can still feel it all, as if it were there.

Sharon forces her attention to Barnes and away from the end of her world. Under his t-shirt, she can see the outline of taped gauze. His right temple to eyebrow is still bruised – blue instead of purple and decidedly less swollen. The smallest, pinkest red line announces where the tip of the other Steve's knife had pierced his throat. It hasn't been long – couldn't have been.

"You need to shave," she comments.

Any other time, he'd have an irritated reply ready to fire. Barnes is somehow equally shit at showing things as he is at hiding them. "How are you?"

As sharp as she can muster, hoping her glazed eyes convey authority, she responds, "Not ready for what you're not saying."

He frowns, a terrible liar. "Extremis is an option. PT, either way."

That's a no-brainer, but it's still – her leg is gone. They're home. They survived. Barnes isn't telling her something, and so, something is even more wrong than what happened in that dark hallway.

All of it together swirls a torrent of mushed-together emotions inside of her, none of which she needs displayed for anyone.

"I will if you will," she redirects, hearing a shake in her voice and feeling a tremble from inside. She attempts a smile. "Extremis."

The nice thing about Barnes is that he knows when to play. "No, but I have connections, if you want a crazy metal leg."

Sharon huffs out a laugh and drags her thumb and index finger under her eyes, collecting stray tears. "I didn't think we'd make it," she explains, hiding her trembling hand under her blanket. "What aren't you telling me?"

All the humor gone, Barnes levels at calm and somber. "It can wait."

"Please." That's as close to begging as she'll come. "What?"

Nothing – not one clue – crosses his face, not even when he finally speaks his mind. "Sam's...died. Sam died."

He opens his mouth then closes it again, something aborted, and she's happy to not know if there's more.

That news alone hits her like a brick wall: head swimming, enough air hard to come by, thoughts frozen on  _Sam's dead_. The most unreal thing happens: her hands stop trembling, her insides stop shaking, her eyes suck up all the unwanted tears, and icy, numb cold creeps along her body.

Shock, maybe.  _Sam's dead._

"I'll get Cho."

 _Sam's dead_.

She pulls the cover over her head:  _Sam's dead._

_***_

In the hallway, Barnes waits the nineteen minutes for Cho to leave Sharon's room. He only wants to make sure Sharon's all right.

Eyes heavy, nausea gnawing at his gut, he folds in half, head between his knees, and damn near falls asleep.

His back aches.

The darkness behind his eyelids rolls.

_Click!_

Cho's voice jars him awake. "You shouldn't have told her."

Barnes sits up straight and blinks the spinning blur out of the too-white hallway. He stands up too quickly, a sharp, jagged pain shooting up his back, but fuck it. Who cares.

He begins to walk toward the stairwell, throwing back, "She picked up on it. I'm not lying to her."

"Before you go - do you have a moment?"

Barnes grips the corner of the wall, easing the pressure off his back. He needs to stop getting stabbed and shot in the same fucking place; it's getting old. "For what?"

"To discuss the results of your brain PETs and MRI."

He could laugh all day. "Newsflash."

Cho smiles at him, lips pressed tight, eyes searching his face for something he won't give her. "I have answers for you."

Three or four years before Insight, he'd overheard a HYDRA doctor say he was "end-of-life." He'd thought he wouldn't wake up again, but he had, a blink in time to 2012, with a mission to assassinate Captain America at the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics.

Steve had come back from the Arctic, and they'd found a use for their expended asset. After Insight, they hadn't cared to go after him, hadn't cared that he was out there, because he wasn't supposed to have lived long enough or functioned well enough to do anything.

He doesn't need her answers. He's had them for years.

Nevertheless, he asks for one: only one answer. "How long until I die?"

How long until Steve gets that news.

Cho shakes her head. "Not that simple. Come with me."

She walks slowly, as he limps behind her, making his muscles do their fucking job. It's been eight, almost nine days – plenty of time for his serum to take care of the damage. It's not going to.

In a bright white room, Barnes leans against a pristine white wall and waits, as Cho logs into a computer and navigates to whatever it is that she thinks is important.

On habit alone, he taps into his smartwatch, pulls up the messages app, and has selected "Sam" before realizing what he's doing. The last message from Sam had come through right before lift-off that last morning:  _"Ur face sux. Pizza & college ball tonite?"_

People die. Sam'd never been a guarantee.

Four PET scans pop up on two fancy, high-def screens. By and large, he has no idea what the intense swaths of colors mean, but he knows they show why he has constant, dull headaches; stabbing, splintering pains like jagged knives of lightning cutting through his head; and, sometimes, swaths of time lost to black blankness. It's all right there.

"You with me?"

Barnes looks at Cho, realizing that she's been talking while he's been thinking. He doesn't need the details. "Bottom line."

"Best case, I expect to see continued deterioration regardless of additional trauma; however, your serum will likely provide unexpected benefits."

Cho clicks to a monochromatic MRI scan: a close-up of the chips Nazarri had mentioned, a lifetime ago. "The brain enjoys a great amount of neuroplasticity; sometimes, it can find new ways to work. In your case, I expect continued degeneration because of these implants. They are old, deteriorating, dislodged, and damaging."

It would've happened anyway.

He feels his jaw slacken and lips peel apart. Subconsciously, he rolls his left shoulder; its movements used to be smoother, easier, and more natural. In the last year or so, it's given out on him enough times for him to have known this. He'd preferred to think it was the arm getting old.

"Their location is regrettable, and, as such, their removal is quite contraindicated. However, I can arrange a consult with a neurosurgeon, Dr. Strange. He is the very best in the world."

Natasha's been talking about HYDRA's time technology, as if it provides all the fixes and solutions for their world. For Maria – definitely. For Sharon – won't matter. For Sam – no damned way. For Steve – why not roll him back to August 2016.

And for him? For those chips? It would mean taking a lifetime. It would mean rolling  _him_ back to 1945 and dropping stupid, naïve, clueless Bucky Barnes into 2019, burdened by every sin and shadow that wouldn't belong to him.

Barnes owes the world – but not that. It's nothing he wants.

Maybe he owes the world his life.

"No. Focus on Hill." Barnes thinks about that. "And Steve."

Nothing else to be said, Barnes leaves Medical, only to slump in the corner of the elevator, surveillance cameras be damned.

He's known  _exactly_ what he was to HYDRA: property, a prisoner with a job, an object to be kept and maintained, something to be used up and thrown out. They'd known about the brain damage, about the chips, about it all, and kept him alive to kill, kill, kill –

It shouldn't upset him, let alone this much, but he wants to scream until the building disintegrates, he wants to punch and pound this elevator car until its cables snap and it crumples at the bottom of the shaft, and he wants to  _destroy them_.

The elevator stops at Seven. The doors swoosh open. A snap decision made, he heads down the hallway and turns away from his own apartment and from Natasha's.

At Sam's door, he glances at the optic reader and waits for JARVIS to decide.

It unlocks, he opens it, and he smells  _Sam_. Clean sweat from morning runs with Steve. Woody aftershave. Old beer. Coffee.

Barnes retrieves four bottles of cold, watered-down beer from the refrigerator, puts them on the coffee table, and settles on the sofa. He turns the TV on to the last channel Sam had it on and tosses the remote onto the coffee table.

The channel is set to TLC, which means Steve had been in here last. Not surprising.

That world's gone.

As the commercials play, Barnes slouches and leans against the arm rest, eyes blissfully closed. The sharp pangs of a neverending headache threaten to inflate into full-on agony; there aren't enough patches, pills, or needles to make it go away. His stomach flips and flops – and those beers don't even sound good.

So, he keeps his eyes shut and sinks into the cushions, the pulling lure of sleep tempting him down, down –

_Click._

Barnes opens his eyes and expects to see Natasha.

Tony steps inside: gouged lines under his eyes, skin dry and heavy, mouth set in a firm frown. When he sees Barnes, surprise briefly flickers across his expression. JARVIS hadn't warned him, apparently.

These days, there's nowhere left to hide. The team's too small.

Barnes makes himself sit up, grabs a bottle of unopened beer, and holds it out toward Tony.

Tony doesn't have a quick quip, or a weak jab, or anything at all to say. But he walks over, takes the bottle, and sits down – side to side, shoulder to shoulder.

A lady on the TV pops a cottage cheese cyst on some guy's shoulder. Fucking Steve and his shows.

Fucking Sam – died.

Was killed. Sam was killed.

The saccharine idea of revenge sinks anchors into his bones: find the helicarrier, find Rumlow, find them all, and  _kill_.

That's all it can be.

Tony finds his voice: low, thick, a little hoarse. "I killed Seattle. Any advice?"

Could've been worse. Could've been the entire world. Lucky.

Trembling right hand tucked under his thigh, his right eye twitches. Ignoring all that, Barnes takes a long, unavailing drink that spikes his nausea – and considers. "Wasn't you."

After a bit, Tony decides, "Shitty advice. You good yet?"

Barnes could laugh, but he doesn't have the energy, doesn't have the bandwidth, doesn't have anything. "Shitty question."

Tony nods, and Tony drinks.

***

In the evening, Natasha takes the stairs to the roof, not giving herself the disappointment of hope that James is up here. She thinks back to that first week after they'd come back from the alternate world – when Steve hadn't wanted to ask JARVIS for a location. She gets it now.

He  _is_  there, though. She smells his cigarettes a moment after she steps onto the roof. Snowflakes drift through the air, mixing with the white puffs of her breaths.

Natasha finds James sitting in an outdoor club chair on the south side of the roof. She sits in the empty chair next to him and waits for him to talk.

"Did Cho tell you?"

Natasha nods and barely suppresses the urge to pluck the cigarette box out of his hands and toss it over the roof. He'll say that the cigarettes can't possibly do more damage than what's already being done, and she'll want to kick him off the roof for saying it.

"I want to tear them apart for this." Since day one, decades ago, his voice always surprised her. No matter what he was saying, he always sounded the same: even, calm, and mild. "I want our world back."

She's not hearing James, the best possible outcome of the collision between HYDRA and SHIELD. She's talking to Bucky, a kid who never knew so much could be lost. Any other day, this might be considered something like progress. For now and a long time to come, they can't afford to have that person or his regrets.

Natasha leans back and tilts her head onto the pillowed top of the chair. The sky tonight is made of unmoving, gray clouds and a sliver of a moon.

"It's gone," Natasha answers, not unkind but also not kind. "You know that."

Nothing lasts forever. Regimes fall. Families fail. Friends die.

"Don't lecture me," he snaps, still in his mild, easy tone. She could listen to him for hours, even like this.

Natasha rolls her head along the back of the chair and studies him. "Can you do this?"

Audibly irritated, he asks, "Do what?"

Natasha gives him enough time to figure it out for himself. It doesn't take long.

He tosses his cigarette onto the blacktop and lights another. "It's the end."

"Of?"

Elbows on knees, back gingerly hunched, he looks at Natasha with Steve's steel. "Them, or us. I'm here."

For all the times he's said that he's been with them, this is the first that she believes that  _he_ believes in it.

Nine days ago, Quinjet Six disappeared from a radar screen. For more than half a day, James and Sharon were as dead as Sam, as lost as Steve, and as wounded as Maria, this group of people like family extinguished in seconds.

Not all of them.

They don't speak, but they don't need to. Between them, it's clear: HYDRA can't take everything. Not yet.

***

At 0600, Barnes pushes himself out of bed and drags himself into the bathroom. His back to the mirror, he twists around and looks at the red, raw stab wound, all the sutures dissolved. It's not bleeding – but it's not far from it.

It should be a healed knot of pearly skin – definitely by now, after nearly three weeks.

Natasha steps inside, glances at the mirror, and stretches her eyes up to meet his. "Go to Cho."

Today's a busy day. He's got a class in an hour, then a briefing at 0930, then PT with/for Sharon, then an hour of one-on-one with Naceri, and then Steve.

"I will. Later," Barnes replies, despite the sour, disapproving glare she shoots at him. "I've got class."

"No, you don't. I'm covering for you," Natasha says, absolutely no room for discussion in her tone. "There's a reason that's not healing. Go find out."

She touches the still-bruised, still-raised bump on his forehead, from where the piece of Quinjet hit him. He doesn't tell her it aches.

"Fine," he relents, maybe because he's worried too, or maybe because he doesn't have the energy to fight her about this.

As he gets dressed in light combat gear—basically black pants and a black t-shirt, with a totally-not-standard-issue navy blue jacket—Natasha reminds him, "Our priority is the helicarrier. When we find it, we go. We need you to be healthy for that. All of this will be here after. Make sure you are."

Halfway out the door, Barnes loses enough words to swallow his shitty reply.

They all act like he's going to vanish into thin air, never to be found again. He's here. He's with them. He's staying. He doesn't know how to make them believe it.

In Medical, he lies flat on his stomach and lets Cho bunch up his shirt. Her gloved fingers are cold against his skin, and it hurts when she touches the old wound.

"We've tested your blood for pathogens, such as poison. Nothing has been detected."

He'd been hoping she'd say they  _did_ find something: an easy explanation. Normal blood means something is wrong. "All right."

He means to say  _'kay_  but has apparently lost that word, too. Sam would've been thrilled.

"However, this is not healing the way it should be. I'm going to dress it, and I want you to go home and rest. Eat. Sleep. Read. Whatever it is but stay off your feet."

"Fine," Barnes agrees, without any intention of doing that, regardless of how good it sounds. Sam didn't die so he could lay around and eat, sleep, and read.

She rubs a cool cream into the wound, then begins to lay down gauze and strips of tape. "Tomorrow, I want you to come back at 0900. We'll do another PET scan and MRI of your brain. How are you feeling?"

Exhausted. Sore. Pissed off at life. "Fine."

Cho rubs a piece of tape a little harder than the others. "Agent."

"I feel fine," he argues. "Christ."

"You can sit up."

He doesn't hesitate to do that, or to put on his shirt and jacket.

Cho leans against the computer table across from him, her eyes on his forehead bump. "Seizures?"

He hasn't had  _one_. She's probably fucking making those up, to try to force him to stay here.

"No. I lose words. My eye twitches."

Cho nods absent-mindedly. "Do you need a refill?"

He holds back an angry cringe: he hates those pills. He hates how they make him nauseous, and he hates how they make him feel dull, half-sized version of himself that can barely stay awake. The answer is  _no_ , because he hasn't been taking them, but he lies, "By tomorrow."

"I'll call it into the pharmacy down the hall for tomorrow morning. Return tomorrow at 0900. You  _may_  attend your counseling session. Otherwise, rest. No briefing, no PT, no visiting. Captain Rogers and Agent Carter are well taken care of. You're grounded."

No Steve. No Sharon.  _No_.

How she says all that reminds of him of other days. It's not her intention, and he knows she's only doing her job, but his first instinct is to run to Ten, if only to reassure himself that he's not back there.

He doesn't run. Doesn't know if he can, even.

He walks there and arrives as Natasha is finishing up his class. Sweaty and stinky, the trainees filter out of the room, filling the hallway with words like "good to see you," "missed you," and "you coming back soon?"

He coldly ignores them.

Natasha idles in the doorway, almost as if she's blocking his access. "How'd it go?"

There's a chance Cho told Natasha. He doesn't fucking care. "Scans tomorrow morning to figure this out." He gestures at his forehead. "I'm fine."

"That's not what Cho said," Natasha says, bait like worms dripping out of her mouth. He  _hates_ when she does that. "Are you lying to me?"

 _Yes_.

"I'm  _fine_ ," he lies.

His right eye twitches, almost serving as a litmus test.

Natasha lifts an eyebrow. "You're taking your medication?"

 _No_.

"Yes," he lies, though heat slinks up his neck and nips at his cheeks.

He'd stopped three days ago, and nothing's gotten worse, nothing bad has happened.

There is a non-zero chance that he forgot to flush the toilet this morning – the bowl had the rest of his pills dumped inside. She might have seen them. And Cho might have known the entire time that he was lying to her, too.

Natasha's expression brightens, and she jerks her head toward the training gym. "Great. C'mon."

Skeptical, worried, confused, and a dash scared, Barnes follows her into the training gym. She sheds her jacket onto the stack of mats, stretches her neck, and attacks as quickly and unexpectedly as a snake.

He blocks her first attack with a numb, clumsy hand. He steps backward with legs powered by weak, severed back muscles. He can't see the door, the walls, or anything except what's right in fucking front of him: her.

 _It's her_ , he reminds himself. The other's one dead. This is Natasha – and she's not happy. She knows.

She spins around and throws a momentum-powered back-kick at him—he blocks it, moving backward—and segues into a rapid-fire sequence of punches, spins, swipes, uppercuts, and sweeps. He blocks, ducks, shoves, and retreats, out of breath, sweaty, and  _dizzy_  within three minutes.

He won't fight her.  _Can't_.

He sits down on the stack of mats and shakes his head at her. Even that spins the room.

_Fuck. Fuck everything._

A familiar headache spikes behind his right forehead. His eye twitches and twitches. Drops of sweat drip onto his hand.

"What's wrong?" Natasha asks, the answer in the hard set of her eyes. "You're fine."

He can't think of a good-enough answer: not mean enough, not honest enough, not defensive enough, not strong enough.

Natasha doesn't wait for long. "I flushed your pills and pulled the fentanyl patches out of the trash can on Five."

Barnes lays back onto the mats, drapes his right arm over his eyes, and hopes she goes away.

"James."

The pressure in his forehead builds, bounding and pounding and pulsing and –

Suddenly, Natasha is straddling him, her knees on either side of his waist. Her face hovers in front of his, her eyes wide and perturbed.

"What – how did you…"

Natasha pulls back and sits on her calves. "You just lost sixteen seconds."

Those seizures aren't made up after all.

Instead, they're a death sentence.

***

James deposits himself on her sofa, teeth gritted, jaw locked.

On the coffee table, Natasha unceremoniously drops a box of morphine patches and a fresh bottle of Depakote. "Don't throw these out."

He pulls a gray blanket off the back of the sofa and finds the TV remote inside the space between cushions. "You're mad."

Natasha bites her tongue and walks to the dining area, where a bunch of his books sit in a stack on the table. He'll probably want one, and it'll be easier if he doesn't have to get up.

"Are you mad?" he asks,  _his_ tone angry—hopefully, at himself.

"Yes." One of them needs to be honest about this. "What book do you want?"

"Fuck off."

Done with him, Natasha leaves the books, stalks to the bedroom, and slams the door.

He'd  _lied to_ her—and Cho—about something that will hurt him, and, at the wrong time, hurt someone else. Meanwhile, he's spent years throwing himself into fights without a care about his well-being, then shunning medical help.

There's no sense in being mad at him; what's done is done. That's the problem.

Feeling ridiculous, Natasha goes back out to the living room. He's staring at a blank TV screen, and for a split second, Natasha thinks he's having another absence seizure – until his hand repeatedly runs through the front tuft of his hair, failing to battle it in place.

"Three of us are left." She opens her mouth, hesitates, and then decides. "I don't know that we can win."

He continues to stare at the blank screen. "What are you saying?"

"That we need you. Take the pills."

His head whips her way, eyes focused on her – because he can't see her otherwise. "And if I don't want to? What then?"

He might not be able to spar physically, but he's very good about flipping, twisting, and attacking with hurtful ideas and lashing words. Right now, he's trying to spin this around about  _them_  – about if the chips being down mean they're going to use him like HYDRA would. It's his wall going up, just like after July.

He can build his wall all he wants; she'll see right through it.

"We need you, Barnes. One last time, and then—"

A painful mix of spitting mad and gravely hurt, James interrupts, "Don't call me that! And that's what Pierce said."

She doesn't know if that's true, but it stops her cold.

"I'm  _still_  fucking here. I'm  _here_. I've been  _here_. I've done  _everything_ you all wanted;  _everything_."

He's so here that his right ophthalmic and temporal arteries bulge, and he's so here that his eyes water, and he's so here that he brings his numb right hand up to the numb right side of his face, eyes clenching closed.

She's half-tempted to leave him to handle this on his own, but she can't bring herself to do that. She opens the box of morphine patches, pushes up his t-shirt sleeve, and slicks two of them on the back of his right arm.

"It's not about you," she says, not kind. "People here care about you. They rely on you. Do you have any idea—"

_How many people asked about you. How much time we've lost._

His hand drops to his lap. His eyes stare blankly, unblinking. Warned about this, and now having seen it twice, Natasha counts the passage of each slow second.

At eighteen, he blinks, and his hand goes back to his forehead. "I did the fucking counseling. I did the fucking classes. I did the fucking reports. I did the fucking…"

He has no idea he experienced another seizure, and he can't find the word for what she assumes is "missions."

Natasha picks up the orange bottle of Depakote and begins to twist off the cap. "You just lost eighteen seconds."

He plucks the bottle out of her hands and throws it across the room, pills scattering. "What part of 'no' isn't getting through?"

Natasha doesn't  _dare_  pick them up. "All we gave you was choices. You've run out of them."

Natasha goes to the bedroom and shuts the door. His voice follows her: "Just in time to finish up my sloppy fucking seconds from '14. Glad to help!"

Despite her anger, despite the knowledge that  _all of this was avoidable_ , despite the clock winding down, she calls Naceri for guidance.

"Depakote also functions as a mood stabilizer. It  _does_  affect him in that way. As it wears off, you can expect outbursts. I highly recommend he continues taking the dosage he's been titrated to. Agent Romanoff – Natasha – this will not be easy."

It won't be easy for as long as it takes his brain to kill him. That's their finish line to cross, the world not knowing that, without him, it will be empty.

What a wasted opportunity.

What a wasted life.

"I got that. Thanks. I'll try to send him your way."

"Can't wait," Naceri replies.

Natasha ends the call. She can at least forgive the throwing. Everything else – in time. With whatever time is left.

She leaves James to calm himself down and pulls out her tablet, a laptop, and her mission planning notes. She attacks them, trying to pull together  _something_ for when the inevitable happens.

Five fast hours later, JARVIS's notification  _beep_ pierces the silence of the room. "Agent Romanoff, your presence is requested in Conference Room B in Operations. Dr. Banner has made a discovery."

***

Bruce taps a button on his tablet. On the conference room's holographic screen, a map of the other world coalesces into an image of a helicarrier.

"It's hovering over southern Siberia in the alternate world. As far as we can tell, one of the engines is still being repaired."

Tony taps his pen against the table. "Three's enough to fly. They can come at any time."

"But, reasonably, they wouldn't want to risk it. They'll wait until all four are operational," Rhodes surmises. He's probably right. "Do we know the condition of the fourth engine?"

Bruce shakes his head. "Only that the energy scan shows it's significantly cooler than the others. They don't know we've found it; I'd suggest we keep it that way."

"And I'd suggest we neutralize this threat while we have that benefit," Rhodes says. "Any ideas for a game plan?"

Natasha has been working on that. Like days earlier, everyone in this room is everyone they have. It doesn't leave a lot of options. "Sneak on, blow it up."

As expected, Bruce's head shakes. "We have no idea what would happen. It could trigger a temporal meltdown, or trigger the exact thing we're trying to prevent. Like it or not, their machines are linked to our world here.  _Blow it up_ is not an option. And also – it wouldn't give us their tech."

Still holding onto that farfetched idea, she sees.

Natasha perks up an eyebrow. "Thought you'd say that. So: sneak on, steal their algorithm chips. They went through an awful lot of trouble to take back the one Barnes stole."

Bruce shrugs approval: maybe.

"You sneak on, they notice," Rhodes points out. "What then."

Natasha regards Rhodes with a coy smirk, her armor. "I never said it would be me."

"We're talking the end of the world. I've seen it. We barely dodged it in Washington." Tony stops tapping his pen and becomes very still. "We need a Plan A all the way to fucking Z. Bases covered."

Natasha tilts her head and invites him to tell.

"Look, we need more than we have. It's simple math."

The math is very simple. Maria is in a coma. Sam is dead. The Big Guy is only good for massive catastrophes. Sharon can't walk – but can handle Ops. The two others on the team are…

"Rogers is still on suicide watch," Natasha says. "He's in a bad way."

Tony's upper lip quivers. "Desperate times."

"No," Rhodes forcibly interjects, their friend replaced with a colonel. "Whether or not he can do it, it's a risk to us. I'm sorry to say it."

Tony huffs out an angry laugh. "You're kidding."

"No, Tony, I'm not. Two years ago, he shot Barnes and slammed Wilson into a wall, and we all waved our hands and forgot, until he choked you and then punched Maria into a wall. For our benefit or for his, maybe both, he's out."

"He's a good person," Tony replies, each word spit like glass shards. "We owe him."

Rhodes doesn't back down. "We owe him time to recover and mental health services."

"Fine, whatever, we still have Barnes. We take him."

Natasha doesn't have time to answer, before Rhodes stiffens. "No, we're not doing that, either." He laughs, head shaking. "Tony – these people are  _hurt_. The goal is to have a successful mission."

"I've seen him, talked to him. He's not nearly as fucked up as Cho expected." Tony turns a pointed look to Natasha. "Right?"

"Well," Natasha begins, "he threw a bottle of pills at the wall, told me to 'fuck off,' and had two seizures today. Why not put him on a helicarrier? It probably can't go as badly as last time."

Rhodes shuts his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. Tony looks down.

"For the record, I'm just glad none of you are talking about me yet," Bruce mentions.

Natasha taps her tablet's screen to wake it up. James' strong vitals tick away inside a widget on the corner: he's asleep. She bites her cheek, thinking, planning, wondering.

"With enough medication, he might be good for some part of it," Natasha decides. It might be the only way to get him to  _take_  his medication. "I'll talk to him."

Rhodes pushes back in his chair and stands, effectively ending the meeting. Without Maria, leadership goes to him by default; he could say "no, we're not doing that," and the expectation would be for both of them to do as told.

"Okay. It's 1445 now. We go tomorrow at 1000 our time; 2100 target time. Get me a mission plan, from A to fucking Z, by 0100."

After Rhodes leaves, Natasha and Tony both stay seated. The tip of her pen sinks through the paper.

"You're okay with this?" Tony dares to ask.

She knows exactly what to say to shut him up. "HYDRA built him for this. It's only fair that we use him."

Tony's face turns to stone. For all he's ever said "we're not HYDRA," here they are, discussing how to best put to use a walking, talking set of skills.

James might know better than to believe it when he says it, but that doesn't mean there isn't a shade of truth to it.

Natasha leaves Operations and stops in Medical to see Steve.

His hair is shaggy and unkempt. A thick beard covers his unshaven face. He sees her come in and doesn't move a muscle: he stays cross-legged on his bed, back against the wall, hands clasped.

He starts with the standard script. "How's Maria?"

Natasha doesn't lie. "Still in a coma. Can't breathe on her own. She doesn't have family, so it's up to us to decide if she stays here, or if Rhodes begins the process for long-term care."

His eyes dip low. His chin trembles. The bones of his hands creak, as he squeezes his hands together impossibly tight.

Before he breaks bone, Natasha sits across from him and puts her hands on his, eyes warning him to  _stop_. He listens, all ten fingers and all ten white knuckles popping up. He makes fists of his bedcover instead.

"Bucky hasn't come back. He's mad?"

Natasha draws her legs up and crisscrosses them. She's been done lying to him for years, even when it's been too hard to fathom. "He's been sick for a long time."

She swears Steve pales. "His head."

So, Steve had known. She hadn't expected that. "It caught up when the jets went down. He had a stroke and seizures. He's alive and doing better, but he's still sick."

Steve scours her eyes, her face for more than that. "How?"

"It caught up."

Years of damage on top of years of him  _not being careful_  caught up. When she's feeling equitable about it, she knows it could have happened anytime. It could have happened on the upcoming mission and created a catastrophic gap in a plan. It could be the greatest blessing that it's happening now, with time to spare, plan, react.

Steve's eyes swell red, without tears – not yet, at least. "What did you mean 'it caught up'?"

"It was a long time coming, Steve. You might not see him for a little while."

His face flushes bright red. "Every time I…" His hands come up to hide his face. "Can you go."

He's lost everyone and everything, including himself. With that in mind, Natasha squeezes his hands and leaves him in the care of his doctors.

Drained, she heads home.

Inside, the pills have been picked up and the bottle placed back on the table. James sleeps on the couch, his right hand clenched around his forehead. She counts no less than six morphine patches on his arm, in addition to the two she'd added earlier. That's a bad afternoon.

Natasha picks up his legs and sits underneath them, her hand unconsciously rubbing one of his bare calves. On the TV, an episode of  _ER_ plays; at least it's not  _Real Housewives_.

"I fucked up a lot," he admits, voice scratchy and low. "But I love you."

She never says it back, and he knows to expect that.

James pushes himself up and moves his legs off her, his right one lagging almost imperceptibly. It's not enough to get him killed in the field, much like the loss of his peripheral vision isn't enough. The rest of his abilities are not only intact but far beyond the skill level of nearly anyone else on the planet; he'll adapt.

Having another absence seizure is a sure bet, though: sixteen to eighteen seconds of lost time in a firefight counts as a lifetime. The Depakote works for those, for a lot, if he'll take it.

He turns himself around and plops his head on her thigh; his arms worm around her body. "Be easier to…" He can't find the word. That's happening a lot. "…you know. Myself."

 _Kill_ is his missing word. He's giving up.

"We found the helicarrier."

It's not until he doesn't answer or react that she realizes: he's spaced out, eyes staring, while his brain short circuits. She counts the seconds slowly and watches as he comes back with a pained grimace. He presses the right side of his forehead into her thigh.

"It'd be easier, Nat," he mumbles. "Especially for you. I fucked up."

Natasha repeats herself. "We found the helicarrier."

He sits up, eyes heavy and glassy but as focused as he can make himself. His right eye twitches. He looks at her, eyebrows so humanly squashed together. "Seriously?"

She nods and bites her tongue. It's his decision, and she won't say anything more to influence him.

"When do we go?"

Natasha reaches to the coffee table and plucks the full orange bottle of Depakote from it. With a rattle of the pills, she tosses it to him. "It's over Siberia in the other world. We go tomorrow, 1000. Take your pills. Get some rest. And we'll see."

James catches the bottle against his chest. She hands him a lukewarm, open, still-fizzing can of Pepsi from the coffee table.

"You know I have to OD to make them work, right?" he mentions, even as he pops the lid and downs enough pills to kill a few regular humans. "Doctor's orders."

 _If that's what it takes_ , she thinks, ashamed of herself,  _to make you whole again_.

Four hours later, the rushing swish of running water scarcely masks the sound of retching. Natasha slaps her tablet and all of her mission plans onto the dining table, jogs to the bathroom, and cracks open the door.

Inside, his right arm is propped across the porcelain bowl, his head laying atop it. The clammy, bare skin of his back goosebumps, as his muscles and spine undulate with every dry heave.

This is why he didn't want the medication: his serum can't keep up even with that. It still hasn't healed the bruise on his forehead, or fully mended the wound in his back. All of his body's resources are concentrating on healing his brain, and it's still not enough.

She wets a washcloth and places it in his right hand. With stiff, sluggish difficulty, he grasps the cloth, tightly enough to keep ahold of it. Water drips down his arm as he wrings it between clenched fingers, more heaves wrenching his body. Cho can prescribe an anti-emetic.

With that hope in mind, she begins to offer it. "Do you wa—"

" _No_."

The entire world is at stake. In a briefing room, talking in abstract hypotheticals, this plan made all the sense. In this room, watching this happen, all she knows is that her world is under direct, immediate attack.

Not so long ago, the person she used to be would have worked to use him as the set of irreplaceable skills that he is. Approaching this any differently is yet another weakness they can't afford.

Weakness speaks. "You don't need to go tomorrow. We can handle it."

He flushes and turns himself around, so that his back sags against the porcelain. He scrubs his face with the cloth, eyes red and watering.

Of all the times, and of all the places, she's reminded of the hotel in Annecy. She wonders: if they'd known then what would be their future now, would they do it all the same? Would he?

His hands fall to his lap. "I'll be good for it."

 _One last time_  drifts unsaid, carried by the bitter uptick of his lips.

That's not acceptable.

"There's a place I like," she says, "near the Zahirske Reservoir. Up on the mountains, the sunrise burns like fire for miles. You'll love it."

"Oh, we're going?"

Eyebrows perked, she makes her lips twist into a smile. "Yeah. We are. On Friday."

The day after tomorrow. She means it.

Finally, he looks at her. Nothing is promised, and the moment is intentionally let go, a balloon's string slipping through his hand. "I want Cap in on the mission. I want him to plan it. I want him there."

James knows better. Incredulous, she argues, "He's on sui—"

His face is hard. "I don't care. I'll be in Ops."

He gets up like he isn't dizzy, he walks like he doesn't wobble, and he leaves as if he has every confidence that she'll diligently deliver Steve to Ops, Rhodes be damned.

It's the end of the world.

What the hell.

***

Showered, shaved, and dressed in real clothes, Steve stares at the elevator doors. A nice lady's voice counts the floors for him:  _six, five, four_ …

His hand twitches toward the red "emergency stop" button. He doesn't know why he's doing this.

 _Three_.

Too late.

Eyes downcast, Steve locks his jaw as the doors slide open. He could easily stand here and let them slide right back shut, and he could go right back up to Four.

He lets them slide shut.

At the last possible moment, a scarred, visibly trembling hand reaches through and triggers the doors to re-open. Bucky steps into the threshold, keeping the doors open with his body.

Unblinking, Bucky stares at him. "If I'm doing this, you're fucking doing this. Get off the…

that."

Eyebrows raised, Steve questions, "Elevator?"

It's out of his mouth in the same instance he realizes:  _that's part of what Natasha was talking about._

"Yeah. Get off it."

The skin around his bloodshot eyes is sunken and dark. His right hand uncontrollably jitters. A light blue bruise colors a shallow lump on his forehead. Natasha said – well, a lot of things about this, about brain damage, about what he's taking to be functional, about his serum lagging.

Steve asks, "Every time you let me hit you, did you know?"

The elevator's piercing door alarm stings Steve's ears.

Bucky doesn't move. "Don't be a fucking idiot. I got hit in the head with an exploding Quinjet. Let's go."

It all added up. All of it. To this.

Steve can't bear it. "I'm going back upstairs."

"For  _what_?"

Steve weighs the risk of kicking Bucky back. It wouldn't be anywhere near the worst he's ever done, to Bucky or to anyone. "Buck. I'm not gonna ask."

Before Steve realizes what's happening, Bucky reaches in with his left hand and grabs Steve's arm, yanking him straight out of the car, spinning him around, and shoving him backward into the hallway's wall.

Steve's only instinct is to punch. He makes a conscious, halting decision to keep his arms down, entirely off-kilter, no idea what to do.

The elevator doors  _whoosh_ closed. Bucky stands in front of them. "What – won't punch a cripple?"

Bucky doesn't give Steve time to reel, reply, or regret.

"There is a fucking  _helicarrier_  out there. They already wiped out a city. They're going to come back. And you'll be…" Bucky pauses unnaturally, again losing his words. "That's not you."

Maria owes her life to a machine. There's no chance she will ever be a functional, living human being again. He stole her life in a fit of blacked-out rage, a storm he had felt coming for months – and ignored.

Whoever Steve was is gone. Bucky should know the feeling well enough.

Steve looks down the hall toward Ops. Natasha and Tony stand down there, poised to run down here. He glances the other way and sees an unobstructed path to the eastern stairwell.

"Keep the elevator. I'll take the stairs."

He leaves Bucky there: pissed, shaking, exhausted, sick.

Lightheaded, upset, every step feels unreal, and the stairwell door looms further and further out of reach.

"This is  _why_. This is why we fought. This is why I—" That pause isn't a lost word. It's emotional, an outburst, borne of an honesty neither of them are prepared for. Steve stops walking for it. "This is bigger than us."

Steve listens to Bucky walk away, for long enough that Natasha has the time to walk to him.

Her hand around his elbow, she tugs him toward the door. "C'mon. I'll walk you up."

The biggest regret of Steve's life happened on February 29, 1945. Bucky had been eleven days from twenty-nine and  _weeks_  away from the end of the War. He'd fallen, without a friend recognizing the obvious and without a friend thinking to look for him.

Stopping HYDRA is why Bucky had fallen, only to become it.

Steve tilts his head toward the ceiling, eyes squeezed closed, and decides. "One last time."

"It's all we have," Natasha replies.

Side by side, Steve and Natasha walk toward Operations. He doesn't miss the unspoken warning Natasha shoots Tony.

"Hey, Cap," Tony greets, perfectly appropriate: kid gloves, egg shells, whatever it's called. "Good to have you back."

Inside the door to the Operations conference room, Bucky pushes a waiting tablet into Steve's hands. "Don't put me somewhere weird."

Automatically, Steve takes it, what Bucky said barely registering, and looks deeper into the room.

Sharon sits near the head of the table, her attention wholly on him. She gives him a small, tight smile and an encouraging nod of her head. Her face is pale and eyes are tired, but she's as strong as ever.

"All right. It's 1900," Tony announces, as serious as Steve has seen him in a long time. "We have six hours until Rhodey expects our homework turned in. Let's make it good."

Steve settles into a chair and flips through the paltry new intelligence, absorbing it quickly. Bucky sits next to him, arms on the table, head immediately buried in them.

"You came here to sleep?" Tony prods. "We pay you, you know."

Bucky waves a hand in the air, a beat before Tony slaps his shoulder, then moves right along to squeeze Steve's.

Steve looks around the room. Important people are missing. The ones still here are more than friends.

He gets to work.

***

He wouldn't call it sleep, and he wouldn't call it dreaming. It's one of those rough-and-tumble dozes, teetering on the edge of the reality, while the lure of sleep sinks deeper into his skin.

He dreams that this mission planning meeting is happening in the room at the Cosmodrome. Natasha and Steve are at once the others but themselves. Sam is alive. It's hardly a nightmare.

A hot prickle of nausea draws him out of the dream. He lifts his head, attempts a calming breath, and knows immediately he needs to get out of this room.

As he stands and collectedly walks toward the door, he tells the closest person—Tony, as it turns out—"I'll be back."

After a fifteen-minute layover wrapped around a public restroom's toilet bowl, Barnes drags himself upstairs to Four and knocks on Cho's closed office door.

"Come in," she calls.

She doesn't know it's him.

He opens the door to a look of disappointment that she can't hide fast enough. He drives her nuts; he knows.

Cho shuts the lid of her thin laptop and crosses her arms, elbows rested on her mahogany desk. "You missed the brain scans. Beyond that, I heard you're joining a mission. I would register my objection to that but why waste my time."

And that's being  _gentle_. Being fair.

Barnes replies, "Thank you for everything you've done. I've been a pain in your ass."

She doesn't argue that, but it seems to soften her idea of where he wants this conversation to go. "What do you need?"

Barnes leans against the doorframe, because it's taking more than it should for him to stand upright. "We go and stop this, or the world ends."

Her eyebrows raise, silently repeating her question of  _what do you need_.

"Everything you've got – to keep me useful for long enough."

He knows how it sounds, what it is he's asking her to do.

A shade of sadness crosses her expression. "Agent Barnes, I fear we never got through to you."

"No, you did," he answers, genuinely meaning it. "That's why I trust you to do it."

Time stands still between Cho hearing that and accepting it with a measured nod. "Come with me. Let's see what we can do."

***

Nearly an hour and a half after leaving, Bucky slinks back into Ops, melts into his original seat, and rests his head on his arms atop of the conference table.

Steve glimpses a flourishing bruise in the crook of his right arm, and, immediately, he knows what Bucky spent his time away doing.

Natasha settles her eyes on Bucky, with the look of someone who fears an oncoming loss.

It reminds Steve how temporary this day is, even on their best day, and that they're not fighting for themselves, or even for each other. Even if they save the world, theirs has already ended.

He knows what Bucky means to accomplish with this charade: prove to Steve that there's a future after this, that the line doesn't end. It does, is the thing.

Steve pushes that away to focus on the mission plan. Everyone in this room except one has agreed on it as it stands.

"Buck. Take a look at what we have. What would you do?"

Bucky opens one eye and shifts so that he can better glower. "'Throw up' is pretty high on the list. Can you include that somewhere?"

Steve braces himself before clarifying, "I meant as HYDRA."

Either everyone in the room stops talking, or Steve stops being able to hear them. Either way, as far as Steve's concerned, at this moment, it's only him and Bucky.

Bucky sits up, intentionally keeping his left hand on top of his right. It doesn't hide the shaking. "Shoot and punch you a lot." He lifts an eyebrow high, tilts his head, and shrugs – quintessential Bucky. "Just saying."

For the first time in days, Steve smiles, albeit briefly. "Try to avoid that this time."

"We'll see."

"Buck," Steve prompts and slides his tablet over, "take a look."

Bucky takes the tablet and several minutes to swipe through the plan. In that time, Natasha, Tony, Sharon, and Bruce fill the gap with kind chatter – mostly debating the best configuration of people once they board the helicarrier.

Because their best configuration is still shit, without a good way around it.  _One_ more person like them—one who doesn't need a metal suit—would make all the difference. They don't have that person.

So.

Natasha and Bucky will take the engines, then the Command Deck. Steve alone will take the three Control Rooms and their algorithm chips. Tony and Rhodes will –

Bucky exhales and slides the tablet back to Steve. "It's fine, except at the first sign of us,  _they're_ going to warp out and, if  _they_  can, go for a…"

Another lost word. Bucky struggles to say it for only a few seconds, before shaking his head.

In jest, Steve tries, "Walk?" Probably not that. "Drink?"

"Hot night out on the town?" Tony offers.

"Ride," Sharon contributes.

Bucky looks simultaneously exasperated and entertained. For a flicker of a moment, Steve forgets what he did to Maria, that Sam died, and that Bucky is only this functional by the grace of a toxic, untenable level of medication. Oh: and HYDRA could wipe out a sizeable part and/or entire population of the world at any given second.

"City. They'll go for a city," Natasha sharply interjects. "Clock is ticking."

Bucky puts his head back down, a middle finger raised at all of them.

Tony clears his throat. "The most important thing we just confirmed—"

" _Don't_ ," Bucky loudly complains.

"—is that the minute we're made, they're here. So, like I said an hour ago, first things being first, we need to eject their warp core."

 _Star Wars_. That's from  _Star Wars_. Steve gets that reference.

"And, like I said an hour ago, you  _can't do that_ ," Bruce snipes.

Bucky lifts his head, a deep, important thought on the tip of his tongue. "If—"

"Okay, Captain, let's give it all we've got."

That voice doesn't belong to Tony, or Sharon, or Bucky, or Natasha, or Bruce. It's not even from Rhodes. It's a voice Steve hasn't heard in years.

Leaning against the doorway, Clint Barton smirks. "C'mon now. That was pretty good."

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 17: Orion in the Sky._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	17. Orion in the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony looks into Steve’s blood-filled eyes and draws in a breath, years of shit to be said with no time left. He activates his helmet and blasts off into the sky.
> 
> Meanwhile, Natasha counts down the time, butterflies twirling in her stomach like little girls in a room made of red. It’s only the world teetering on a tightrope, and only her family whose fall will herald the whimper.
> 
> The Avengers embark on their last mission: to save the world but not each other.
> 
> The world ends here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Major character death. Violence. Depictions of torture. Discussion of suicide. Vague description of non-con.
> 
> Here we go!

January 3, 2019. It's a Thursday night, quickly bleeding into Friday morning.

Cloaked at 46,000 feet above the dark ground of the alternate world, Steve engages auto-pilot, pushes his chair back, and stands.

In the cargo bay, Bucky straps into his chute, right hand fumbling to clasp the latch. Steve catches a muttered "fucking son of a  _bitch_ ," a moment or two before Steve steps clean into Bucky's space and takes care of the latch for him.

"I had it."

"Well," Steve replies, as he shrugs into his own 'chute, "then there isn't a problem."

"Whatever." Bucky tightens the strap on his and double-taps the button to lower the ramp. "We good to go?"

Steve glances back at the cockpit's controls, right as the coordinates display lights up bright green. They're directly above the helicarrier: good to go.

Frigid air whirls through the cargo bay and sucks at the secure,  _whap-whap-whapping_  netting. Hardly bothered by it, Steve steps beside Bucky and sinks his eyes into the dark night sky. It's a moment, and all Steve can think to say is –

Bucky steps aside, walks behind Steve, and immediately comes back with Steve's intentionally-forgotten shield. Unceremoniously, Bucky shoves it at Steve's chest and lets go, all but forcing Steve to take it.

"Nice try, Cap," Bucky says, then throws himself out of the jet.

"Don't call me that" dies on Steve's lips, his shield a familiar, fortifying weight in his hands. He loops it over his arm.

With no more time to spare for second thoughts, he dives into the thick, gray clouds of the Siberian night sky.

Quinjet Eleven flies on without them.

***

A silent knot broils in Natasha's stomach.

Natasha pilots Quinjet Eight toward what is supposed to be the underbelly of an invisible helicarrier. She's entirely relying on Tony's identification algorithm –

"Proximity! Proximity!"

Hands loose around the controls, Natasha nimbly pulls the jet back a paltry fifty meters, then holds it steady. Through the windshield, all she can see is a night sky filled with a sea of pinprick stars.

Behind her, Clint announces, "Releasing bay door," three seconds before Arctic air rushes into the jet.

Natasha does nothing to brace herself against it. Her job is to remain perfectly focused on holding the jet steady – and, most importantly, clear of the helicarrier.

Reflected in the glass of the windshield, Natasha watches Clint draw an arrow, load it into his bow, aim, and wait, picture perfect still.

Exactly eleven seconds later, the tell-tale ripple of the helicarrier's cloak snips away the stars. The cut-out of the sky drops away to reveal the precise location of the ship.

_Bingo._

Natasha flies them twenty meters closer to the hull, then drops them ten meters.

Done.

As quick as can be, Natasha unstraps, kills the engines, and darts to the cargo bay. She latches onto Clint's waist, just as the jet begins to fall nose-first and just as he fires his arrow.

Together, their bodies turn weightless. The jet falls without them.

The thick rope of Clint's arrow catches, and they swing widely toward the helicarrier's invisible underbelly. The sharp, unforgiving wind blasts against them; it sucks moisture from her face and whips stinging clumps of her short hair against her face.

There's every chance in the world that they'll slam directly into the helicarrier's hull. No person in the world could blame Clint for miscalculating the location of  _an invisible,_ floating ship. Well – except Clint.

Clint didn't miscalculate. They swing under the belly, the tip-top of Clint's hair brushing against metal, and then back out toward the other side. At a deftly accurate moment, Clint clicks a button on his bow that stiffens the rope into a cord, then another button that stabilizes them in one place.

The cord retracts and pulls them upward.

"Elevator going up," Clint quips, something like a dazzle in his eye, or so says the self-satisfied smirk on his face.

Natasha holds back a smile, certainly not encouraging him by admitting  _I missed you_.

***

Steve maneuvers his body into a head-down position, his arms and shield tight against his side, legs pinned together. Somewhere below him, Bucky should have already reached terminal velocity – and it occurs to Steve that Bucky's going to either land on the helicarrier's flight deck first…

…or completely miss it and parachute into the relative safety of the Siberian wilderness.

Selfishly, Steve almost,  _almost_ hopes for the second option. He can handle the chips; Natasha and Clint can more than handle their part.

A couple hundred meters below, Steve's eyesight cuts through pitch black darkness. He catches a momentary glimpse of a large swath of black fabric thrash away in a cyclone of atmospheric wind.

All hopes aside, that settles that: Bucky's on the helicarrier.

Now, Steve must ensure that  _he_ doesn't miss the helicarrier and dive into the Siberian wilderness.

Steve shifts into a feet-down position, pulls his rip cord, and braces himself against the violent jerk of the wind catching his chute.

Eyes focused on where he thinks the helicarrier hovers, he sees a limp body careen through thin air, followed by another. That  _more_   _than_  settles that: Bucky's on the flight deck.

The helicarrier's cloak ripples, in time for Steve to yank his riser, cut hard to his right, scamper onto the blacktop, and slice through the 'chute's lines with his shield. He eases into a roll designed to repurpose his momentum into a swift sprint.

Steve silently darts to the right, shield at the ready.

The world ends here: he doesn't intend to make it nice.

His first swing decapitates a soldier. Blood splashes onto the ground.

His second swing cracks open a forehead. Steve tosses the body over the edge of the carrier.

He back-kicks another unsuspecting soldier over the edge, then runs up behind another and snaps her neck.

At this altitude, no one should be on deck. HYDRA was expecting them to come: maybe not right this second but at some point. That promises to make the rest of this mission real fun.

Steve tears through another half-dozen HYDRA fodder, killing them more quickly than they deserve – not out of some misplaced sense of mercy, but only to keep within the primary mission parameter of  _stealth._

They killed Sam.

They hurt Sharon.

They killed Fury.

They took seventy years of Bucky's life and then the years he had left.

They took enough of Steve to all but kill Maria.

 _Maria_.

Steve blinks, looks behind himself, and sees a path of new bodies. Blood drips from a shield that doesn't belong in his hands.

Ahead of him, he sees no one. He hears no one. Smells no one.

Steve rounds the front of the carrier and unapologetically moves into Bucky's territory. Steve doesn't find bodies or any living soldiers. Bucky's thrown and/or kicked all of them off the flight deck.

He continues on.

Dead ahead, a shadowed figure darts from the side of a stack of equipment boxes, leaps up the back of an unsuspecting soldier, knots his legs around that soldier's head, and drops down  _hard_ onto the tarmac.

 _Snap_ , goes the neck.

Bucky doesn't stop there: with an effortlessly smooth movement, Bucky flips the dead body off the side of the helicarrier, spins to his feet, and steps into a honed ready position.

It's a little like 2014.

Only Bucky doesn't see a soldier creeping up on his right: one hand moving toward a comm piece, and the other bringing a weapon to bear.

Steve rockets the shield at the assailant, at the same time Bucky turns and lobs a knife. The knife sinks through the soldier's helmet two seconds before Steve's spinning shield crushes the windpipe.

The soldier drops – dead.

Bucky catches the shield on its ricochet, turns, and lightly tosses it back to Steve.

As Steve catches it, he checks to make sure there aren't any sounds, smells, or other hints of combatants lurking around the cluttered deck. It's clear, and their clock is ticking.

Steve trots up near Bucky.

Bucky brushes nonexistent dirt off his right shoulder: false swagger meant to hide his heavy breathing and moonlit face blanched with cold sweat. "I had'em."

"I know. Couldn't let you out class me."

Steve glances at his watch, the seconds ticking down toward 21 minutes. Natasha and Clint have four minutes left to complete phase one, hopefully before HYDRA realizes their entire,  _entire_  flight deck is dead.

***

The path from the flight deck to the control relays is the same as it was in 2014.

The people here, though, don't step out of Barnes' way in a twisted synthesis of fright, deference, and relief. No, the people here see his arm—hologram down, silver metal shining, Steve's shield painted over HYDRA's Soviet brand—then waver between aiming their weapons and freezing in terror.

Either way, each of them die, either by his hand or Steve's.

On the outside, it might look something like redemption: back to a helicarrier, fighting on the right side, taking the right lives, doing the right thing.

It feels like failure. The kid he grew up with—that solemn, stupid, sarcastic, incorrigible, spitfire fuckface—isn't the person by his side. That person's gone, when this, all of this, was never supposed to have touched him.

Steve cracks the sharp edge of his shield into a head. Between the impenetrable metal of the shield and Steve's inhuman strength, that person's brain damn near liquefies. The body it belongs to folds onto the floor.

 _I shouldn't have brought you_.

 _I don't want us to be this_.

For the last seventy-seven years, it hasn't been about what he's wanted.

Barnes walks up to a soldier, smacks the weapon out of her hand, and breaks her neck with a quick grab-and-twist of her head. As he does it, his back cramps, the muscles twisting into tight spasms.

He catches the worried look Steve spares him. Barnes alleviates that worry with a lighthearted, right-handed whack against Steve's shoulder.

It seems to ameliorate whatever's gnawing at Steve's mind. "Not this time, Buck."

That, at least, is darkly funny enough that Barnes smiles, if only because Steve's in a good enough place right now to make that joke. "Funny."

"I thought so."

The long, long line of bodies behind them wouldn't so much agree.

Together, they cross a narrow, brightly lit, metal-floored causeway that leads to Deck Nine – and, with an ounce of what Tony and Bruce would never call "luck," the control relays.

Steve kicks open a steel door, plows through the opening, and throws his shield at someone.

Barnes calmly walks through behind him – not really happy to let Steve do the work but cognizant that his back is still spasming, his eye is twitching, and they're more than likely going to have to fight their way out of here. He'll save whatever he's got left for that fight, to make sure Steve gets home.

 _Click, click, click, cliiiick, click_ snaps through the comm. That's Natasha and Barton: good to go.

Good.

Meanwhile, Deck Nine looks…a little different than it had on the last helicarrier he'd seen. In 2014, it'd been that one, cavernous room: a raised catwalk down the middle, the chip relay dead center, with a sky-high ceiling and a concave, domed floor.

That's not this Deck Nine. If he had to guess, he'd say HYDRA knocked out Deck Ten and maybe Deck Eleven and spent a lot of time reworking the entire layout. It looks  _nothing_ like the one he'd tried to kill Steve on.

A metal-grated, dark gray floor builds into a wide, long corridor at least two hundred meters long. Although his footfalls are mostly silent, each dull thud sounds hollow, as if there's not much below the floor. The ceiling stretches and reaches, at least fifty meters high and made of dark metallic sheets.

Barnes saddles up to Steve, toes away a body, takes a breath to speak, and—

"It's an older helicarrier," Steve says. "It looks like the one from 2012."

It doesn't make a difference, not with Stark's scan from Seattle telling them where to go. This one's close enough to the plan. But it  _is_ different, and it  _might_ change their plans, in incremental ways that potentiate into catastrophe.

His right eye twitches. His back spasms again. A sharp pang aches deep inside his forehead. Annoyed irritation strangles the best part of him, the part that could've once run this entire mission upside down and backwards in thirty minutes flat or it's free.

A layout change doesn't  _change_ anything: not how many relays there are, not that they're on this deck, and not how they're going to split up and yank each chip before HYDRA has a chance to use them again. It won't change what Natasha and Barton are doing. It won't change what Tony and Rhodes are doing.

He realizes the issue:  _I want to go home_.

He wants pizza and football with Sam. Quiet, too-early mornings with Steve. Easy evenings with Natasha. Juvenile jokes with Sharon. Fast briefings with Maria. Coffee with Naceri, who gave him a space to figure out his own shit. A class of clueless kids.

Enough of that doesn't exist anymore. Today, this helicarrier, this mission is  _it_.

"Tony's scans from Washington pinpointed the relays here," Steve states, picture perfect Captain America. "Ready?"

"With bells on."

"I…" Steve pauses. "That's not the right saying, Buck."

"Oh?"

***

Natasha slips between a chipped-gray railing, drops down a sub-level, and silently lands on the tips of her toes and fingertips.

Swiftly, she creeps to the shadowed back wall with even, smooth movements. The three soldiers keeping guard don't notice her.

Natasha slinks amongst those shadows, each measured, fast footfall perfectly hushed. She passes behind soldiers four and five, little more than a whispered shadow that they never notice.

Child's play.

Natasha arrives at her second engine compartment without breaking a bead of sweat. She sidesteps a set of surveillance cameras, stays out of their watchful gazes, and retrieves a small block of explosives from her pack.

This carrier is like the old ones, like the one from 2012. That alone makes the mission a shade easier.

Natasha ducks into a service conduit, pulls herself through the length of it, and comes out under the whooping, furious blades of Engine 3's turbine:  _WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP_.

Her eardrums vibrate.

Her skin ripples.

Her eyes water.

She plants the charge, inserts the detonator, and gets the hell out as fast as she can.

As long as Clint has done his part, that's the last engine turbine she has to see. She has no doubt that he has.

Back through the conduit, Natasha cuts left – the opposite direction from where she'd entered. Still slinking through shadows, expertly evading eyes, ears, and cameras, Natasha ascends two decks.

She notes the presence of a myriad of personnel: some in lab coats, others in plain clothes, and others in combat gear. Though far from fully staffed, like in the heyday of SHIELD, it's clear to her: this is HYDRA's primary headquarters, at least for this particular cell.

With an ounce of luck and the expertise of six experienced skillsets, this particular cell won't matter by the end of the hour.

So long as Steve stays stable.

So long as James stays healthy.

That might be asking for something.

Natasha juts down a narrow side hallway, walks nearly halfway down, and then peels off a wall panel. It opens into a dark service tunnel, plenty wide and tall enough for her to stand.

Her eyes adjust to the darkness and see nothing except flat, dark gray panels; thick bundles of colored wires; and empty, hollow space.

She walks a precise 160 meters, comes to an expected t-intersection, and turns left.

A dark figure looms near the middle of the new passageway.

Natasha raises her sidearm. She steps toward the figure, eyes fighting to discern the shape from the shadows.

Five foot eight, nine.

Male.

Built.

Leaning against the wall, one foot flat against it.

Something like a quiver –  _maybe_ – on the back.

"What took you?" Clint's whispered voice cuts through the dark quietude. "You used to be fast. Have I been gone that long?"

Natasha lowers her weapon and crosses the distance. Up close, she sees his smirk.

"Now you're old and slow?" he continues.

Natasha ignores all of that, if only because they can't afford to be heard bickering. "Are they set?"

Clint nods, expression saying  _you really have to ask?_

She shoots him the same expression back: bad assumptions kill good missions. She reaches up to her ear piece and taps the signal through to tell Steve and James:  _you're on_.

There isn't a signal for  _stay healthy_ , or even one for  _stay stable_.

***

Steve finds his first control room with ease. Before the two soldiers standing guard can radio in and make the mission, Steve throws his shield and kills them both dead with a simple  _CRACK, CRACK_ ¸  _thud, thud_.

Almost too easy.

The control room itself looks somewhat familiar. He stands on firm ground in a cavernous room. Ahead of him, about twenty meters across, the outer wall is made of floor-to-mid-wall windows – a design that strikes him as hare-brained.

Above him, a metal catwalk leads to a familiar control relay in the center. Even from down here, Steve can see the chip's transparent housing and small control panel.

Simple.

Steve launches into a sprint and easily hops up onto the catwalk. His boots softly  _clang_ against the hash-marked metal.

Fifteen meters dead ahead, the control panel waits undefended. This time, Bucky's not trying to—

An agonized, raw scream echoes through the deep, hollow room. The voice it belongs to slices through Steve and fills his body with tight, singing dread.

_No._

Without thinking, without planning, without waiting, Steve darts to his right and hops over the railing. He lands hard and fast onto the floor below, takes one look at the source of the scream, and doesn't waste time  _freezing,_ or  _thinking,_ not when terrified anger transforms into a ferocious reflex to  _fight._

He sprints toward it, while the recorded sound of his own cracked, broken voice echoes around the room.

It's a holographic recording of himself – from Death Valley. On his knees, with his arms restrained behind his back. Face beaten raw and bloody. Deep cuts and lacerations leaching blood through blistered, bubbled lines of furious red burns across his arms, neck, and chest. HYDRA's symbol burned there.

Seeing red in a sea of black, Steve floats above himself as he primes his shield, while his eyes search for the emitter, while his brain scours for a way to  _shut it off_.

His voice screams, and screams, and screams –

_Shut it off!_

Steve steps in close to the hologram, his shield swinging uselessly through it.

A metal fist slams square into Steve's face.

Pain gushes through his sinuses. Streaks of gold stars flash in his vision. Steve's center of gravity disintegrates, as he crashes backward onto the floor. His shield skids away, out of reach of his dazed, adrenaline-tipped fingers.

 _Buck_   _– it can't…_

Steve quashes the thought.

He flips up to his feet, swipes away blood from his nose, and eases into a defensive stance: fists loose, feet square, breaths impossibly even. He sniffles a wad of blood through to the back of his throat and hocks it out to somewhere on the floor.

It all betrays the shock, fear, and bewilderment crawling under his livewire skin.

The imageof Steve—bloody, beaten, hurt—ripples and then vanishes, much like a TV screen being turned off. The vanished image reveals another person: waiting, smirking, flexing metal fingers, blue eyes gleaming.

"You always could take a hit."

It's a placid, even voice Steve's known for ninety-eight years, give or take. It's a face he's grown up with, fought with, fought against, loved, hated, revered, despised, and everything,  _everything_ in between.

Steve doesn't believe it's him.

But.

A part of him—small, but big enough—doesn't know what to think.

Bucky takes a step forward.

He's wearing the same clothes as today: the suit made by Tony and Bruce, with the Avengers seal on the right shoulder. A purple-green bump shines on the right side of his forehead, nineteen days and counting since Quinjet Six exploded into shredded metal. Steve's shield overwrites HYDRA's red star on his arm.

It's impossible.

Steve bleeds ground with a reciprocal step backward. His throat constricts. Phantom pains burst along his body – from the fury of that metal fist, from a drill, from a gun, from unspeakable things.

It's impossible.

_One, two, three, breathe._

_One, two, three, calm._

That smirk twitches, and those eyes gleam brighter. "You really thought I'd ever be SHIELD? You've gotta be fucking kidding me."

Steve doesn't believe it – but enough of him  _does_  believe, enough that he can't think through the evidence against this, and that he can't think through how this  _has to be_ another person wearing another photostatic veil, or a full-body hologram.

"What gets me the most is that none of you  _wondered_. About any of it." Bucky steps forward again, and that smirk widens when Steve retreats backward. "You wanna know a secret,  _Cap_?"

Two years ago, that voice said those words with that tone and with that smirk. Steve's wrists ached down to his fractured, splintered bones. Cold, damp blood slowly oozed down his arms, slinking over layers of caked-on, older blood – lava making islands, burning paths through to bone, reshaping the anatomy of his limbs.

 _Cha-chink._ A bullet slid into the worn chamber of a SIG Sauer P-220. The weapon waved in the air, barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

"Weiselheim. The mass grave, behind the factory. You wanna know a secret, Steve?"

In late '44. Behind the factory. A mass grave filled with soft, oozing bodies, naked limbs sticking out of the lightly packed ground. Blackened skin. Marbled veins. Swirling, black flies and swarming, white maggots.

The sky far above was as blue as ever, not a wisp of a cloud in sight. The sun warmed Steve's skin and the pile of bodies alike. The air was crisply cold, but the wind didn't blow, and the smell hung low and permeating: stuck in his throat, soaked into his skin, coated his eyes.

As Steve vomited, Bucky's hand settled on his back. "We can beat this. I'm with you."

Steve's fingers curled against the hard ground. "They're people, Buck."

Bucky looked to the grave and inhaled a deep, disgusting breath. Eyes downcast, Bucky vomited platitudes, while Steve realized,  _They're your people_.

Word coming out of Romania—the area where Bucky's mom came from—was bad. Cataclysmic. No hope. It'd been that way for years, but now… Now.

The uncertainty on Bucky's face betrayed every shade of strength Bucky tried to give Steve. And the way Bucky's eyes scoured the grave and its pile of people for answers told Steve everything.  _Everything_.

"You don't know," Steve offered. "They – they wouldn't be here."

Bucky dropped the act, while Dugan mercifully led Gabe, Dernier, and Morita into the seized factory, far and away. "They'd be somewhere. Does it matter?"

Months and months earlier, a few days might've made the difference between finding Bucky in a lab – or never finding Bucky in another pile of people and spending a lifetime wondering. Good thing Steve's stomach was already emptied; that thought alone was enough to turn him inside out.

Steve stood up, taking those seconds to try to find  _something_ to say. "Buck—"

Hard resolve encased Bucky's face in statue-still steel and stole Steve's breath. "We're doing the right thing. We're stopping this."

Funny: everyone called  _Steve_ the naïve one.

 _Cha-chink._ A bullet slid into the chamber of a worn SIG Sauer P-220.

"Weiselheim. The mass grave, behind the factory. You wanna know a secret, Steve?"

The weapon waved in the air, barrel pointed toward the ceiling.

"I remember thinking – how could anyone become a person who could dig a hole in the ground  _that deep_  – and fill it with bodies? I thought – that if I ever became that person, that I hoped someone would kill me."

_Clickclickclick-cliiiiiiiiiiiiick._

A metal fist breaks Steve's cheekbone. A booted foot slams into his chest. Less than hurt and more than dazed, Steve tumbles backward to the floor, landing on ass and palms.

_BANG!_

Liquid agony surges through his left thigh. Steve bites clean through his tongue, a scream tucked away at the tip of his throat. He won't. He  _won't_.

Bucky looms above him, a SIG Sauer lowering to hang loose at his side. With appraising eyes, locked jaw, and unknown thoughts sifting through all of Steve's possible fates, Bucky looks down on him.

"The dead one Nat found? We grabbed him from Berlin in June. Your pretty little blonde fuck never realized. Put it together, Rogers."

Steve's brain spits out three words in the form of a thought:  _It's not him_.

"I'll even help. Ruining you for all the world to see. Sending you all to Kozerska – you got real lucky there. Sending Sam and Nat to Chișinău. Killing your agents – you shoulda seen that. Setting up the base attack. Making sure the jets went down; at least we got Wilson. Oh, and Naceri? Totally and completely HYDRA. Did I miss anything?"

Steve works his jaw and winks his left eye; pain ripples up from his cheekbone, even as the crushed bone crackles and crunches. That's gonna bruise.

"No," Steve replies, voice cracked and tinged with pained anguish, but, all in all, strong enough to do, "you got it all. You got us."

"No, not yet, I don't."

***

Barnes finds the control room with ease. Before two sentries can radio in an "uh oh" to the Command Deck, Barnes shoots them both dead with his semi-assault rifle.

Always this easy.

The control room itself looks somewhat familiar. He stands on firm ground in a cavernous area. Ahead of him, about twenty meters across the entirety of the space, the outer wall is made of floor-to-mid-wall windows.

Above him, a metal catwalk leads to a familiar control relay in the center. Even from down here, Barnes glimpses the algorithm chip's transparent housing and small control panel.

Under that relay, he spots a stainless steel lab table, affixed with thick, metal restraints. He knows: the other version of him, the other Steve, had been here, many, many times.

He wants Tony and Rhodes to rip this place in half and light it on liquid fire.

Time's running.

Barnes launches into a half-sprint and readies to make the easy hop up onto the catwalk. Each step as noiseless and quick as the last, he times his speed with the precise distance from which he plans to jump.

He pushes off his left leg and expects to sail up onto the catwalk. Rather, sharp, stabbing pain lights a line of excruciating pain that sizzles straight up his back. Instead of going  _up_ , he goes down hard onto his knees and palms.

Cold, clammy shock ripples across his skin, even as that sharp pain seizes his lungs.

_Not fucking now._

That lab table is right in front of his face. The faintest tinge of blood settles inside his nose. He looks up and glimpses the tip of a black-granite helix.

He looks away.

All he needs is – one last mission. One last time.

Barnes pushes himself up and falls back onto his haunches. Another burst of pain spikes through his back. He silently counters it with HYDRA's rhythmic breathing.

_One, two, three, red._

_One, two, three, black._

_One, two, three, red._

_One, two, three, black._

SHIELD's made him too fucking soft.

This pain is nothing. This mission is nothing. This is nothing. That's all it can be.

He forces himself to his feet, then back toward the door. He gives himself another slow, running start, this time knowing exactly what to expect.

He pushes off the floor.

Pain shoots up his back.

Regardless of that pain, he jumps, catches the railing with both hands, and hauls himself up onto the catwalk.

If beads of sweat roll off his forehead and onto his arms, he doesn't care.

If his even, timed breaths come raggedly, he doesn't care about that, either.

He moves across the catwalk and walks straight up to the control panel. From a tactical vest pocket, he fishes out a supposed decoy-and-destroy chip. He flips open the transparent chip housing near the control panel, plucks out the algorithm chip, and inserts the decoy.

Barnes waits.

For an alarm. For an army of soldiers. For a self-destruct sequence to initiate. For the control panel to flash an error message. For anything.

The control panel's LCD tinged-green screen continues to display "system normal."

Ok—

His back screams and head throbs. The soft  _thrum_ of the helicarrier's engines and electronic systems buzz in a wash of white noise around him.

SHIELD's plan is to get this done and then get the fuck out. Steve's plan, actually.

 _Sorry, Steve_.

Barnes thinks that, as he sinks to the metal, hashmarked floor and leans against the cold railing. His left shoulder  _clings_ against it, the death knell of his fucking life.

He taps his earpiece:  _clickclickclick-cliiiiiiiiiiiiick._  It tells the team that one chip's down. His hand drops to his lap.

Cold sweat spikes across his skin, while a bubble—a god damn fucking bubble—slowly expands under his forehead. His eye twitches.

Barnes perches his right arm on his knees and stares at the digital numbers ticking down on the cracked face his Wenger watch. It's gonna –

***

The SIG Sauer comes to bear: not aimed at Steve's head or heart, but his right shoulder. Somewhere to hurt but not to kill.

"We weren't done in the desert, Steve. Would've been easier for you to've stayed. You know that. Pain brings order."

Steve doesn't wait for the  _BANG!_ He doesn't care about his cheekbone, or about the bullet hole spilling too much blood from his leg.

"Gotta start all over now."

Steve lunges for the feet, while drawing one of Bucky's—the real Bucky's—knives from his SOB holster. He swings that knife, the razor-sharp blade swiping at bare skin…

_Claaaaang!_

…bare skin that sounds like metal and ripples like a hologram.

The lunge transforms into a smooth somersault that turns into a shaky hop onto his feet. Shield collected, Steve loops it over his free arm, the knife still held in his right hand.

_BANG!_

Too late, a fired bullet ricochets off the shield.

"Such a fucking honor," Steve spits at a person that he knows, for a God damned  _fact,_ isn't Bucky.

The mask's eyebrows twitch up, and the head tilts, eyes rolling. As the seconds stretch by, the full-body hologram fades, while a scarred, burnt hand peels away a photostatic veil from chin to forehead.

Deep burns and contractured scars disfigure Brock Rumlow's face. Along the right side of Rumlow's depressed skull, healed, melted skin has replaced brown hair. At the wrong angle, it's almost as if that part of his head has been sliced in half and cauterized. A deep black, fleshy hole supplants where his right eye had once been.

Slap-and-grab, black and gray armor coats Rumlow's entire body in pieces, leaving gaps at each joint. The real stand-outs are the industrial, mechanical braces wrapped around both of the knees Bucky had shattered in 2016.

Bucky's smooth voice replaced with a cracked, scrape-like brogue, Rumlow asks, "Happy, Cap?"

Pain lights up Steve's leg, as warm, sticky blood slinks down his calf. "Thrilled."

***

Barnes perches his right arm on his knees and stares at the digital numbers ticking down on the cracked face his Wenger watch. It's gonna –

Twelve seconds vanish in the space of one. Gone.

_Fucking great._

Barnes brings his right hand up to his face and stupidly tries to hold the bubble in. It's not really a bubble, but that's what it fucking feels like, and it  _hurts_.

A HYDRA person walks into the room, boots thudding loudly against the floor below. Barnes draws his silenced sidearm and kills that person with barely a second glance.

He wonders – no, he  _knows_  that he must've missed the signal from Steve. The signal that means Steve got his chip and moved on to the last one.

That's genuinely great. He'll wait for the signal, wait for Steve, and then get the hell out of here before Natasha and Barton detonate the engines. Go home and die – safe and for good.

He keeps his eyes on his watch and his ears primed to hear for danger. The seconds tick by, each and every one of them, under his watchful gaze. He doesn't lose the time.

A full two minutes tick by – without the signal from Steve.

He's in trouble.

That certainty serving as the proverbial fire in his tank, Barnes jumps down from the catwalk, avoids a dead body, and prudently walks to the second control room. No running or sprinting, no mad dash made of panic – a careful stride, nothing more and nothing less, despite the adrenaline-tipped worry bounding through him.

Inside the control room, he finds three living, undisturbed sentries, all of whom quickly and summarily die: one by snapped neck, two by bullets.

This room is different: no lab table, no visible helix. The control panel sits up higher, as if the helix is  _below_  the floor.

Whatever. It doesn't matter.

He spares a quick glance up at the control panel and zeroes in on the clear housing – its chip safely nested inside.

Steve hasn't been here.

In every scenario, Steve should have beaten him to the second chip  _and_ to the rendezvous point. He had to have run into trouble— _bad_  trouble—in the first control room. That was at least ten minutes ago.

 _Fuck_.

First things first: Barnes gets himself up onto the catwalk. Though considerably less difficult now that he knows what to expect from himself, the headache spikes, while sweat saturates his face.

When he replaces the original chip with his spare decoy, his hand literally shakes. His fingers can barely tap his comm to send the signal to the team.

_Clickclickclick-cliiiiiiiiiiiiick._

Christ – he almost hopes someone from HYDRA kills him, right here and now, but he wants to go home.

It's odd that they haven't even come close – to killing him. That they haven't really even tried. That's the thing: right now, they could – relatively easily.

Barnes looks at the green control panel – "all systems normal." Too easy.

Except for Steve.

Steve.

Barnes hops down off the catwalk and hauls ass out of the room.

***

Poised, protected by his shield, Steve wonders aloud, "What, they could fix everyone else, but not you?"

If that hits, Rumlow doesn't show it.

Rumlow twitches his scarred, disfigured nose and sniffles deep. The SIG Sauer lowers. "He begged you."

_Clickclickclick-cliiiiiiiiiiiiick._

The third chip's down: that's two for Bucky. All that's left is the chip in this room, and Bucky's going to come for it.

Steve stalls. "Who?"

"Your Bucky. 'Kill me,'" Rumlow sneers, eyes lit, scarred mouth turned down in an extreme frown, while a single balled up fist mockingly makes rubbing motions near his good eye. "'Please kill me, Steve. Oh, Steve. I'm sorry, Steve. We're good, Steve.' And you—just kept on going."

Rumlow drops the theatrics and smiles, the livid scars on his face pulling tight. "He screamed so loud. Are you sure you like him?"

It's a ploy to distract and upset him, make him do something stupid.

It works.

A veil of sharp, fire engine red encapsulates Steve's world. Agonized pain detonates inside of his knuckles, all five one moment, then the next five the next second, again and again.

A hard fist hooks into Steve's jaw, his cheekbone, his gut.

His brain nowhere to be found, Steve responds with vicious, bone-crushing punches and kicks

His bad right elbow gives, a moment before barbs of lightning shoot up and down the nerves.

His left knee buckles, the shredded tendons and crumbled cartilage from 2016 giving out. A metal-sheathed boot jabs into the back of it –  _crunch_.

That boot sails into his face, then into his side.

The hard, cold floor welcomes Steve with a shock back to reality – and an air-depriving weight bearing down on his windpipe. He spurts out fraught coughs, while his left hand desperately and impotently swipes at Rumlow's leg.

Rumlow stares down at him: blood oozing from a busted nose, two black bruises beginning a ferocious swell under his eye sockets. "I stopped counting at nine. Nine times you killed him. And then four more times, a little slower."

Rumlow isn't talking about  _Steve_. He's talking about Rogers and the other Bucky. About the body back home.

Steve's left leg won't bend, but his right one –

"You hated him so much that you… Well. You saw the body. I only helped a little."

Rumlow's boot presses down harder, and Steve can't breathe.

But he can think of that body. And he knows that Rumlow isn't lying – not about this.

"After four times of that, of  _you_ , his brain finally gave out. Seventy years with us, and it took you—" Rumlow tilts his head back and forth, counting, "—two months to break'em in half. If it hadn't been for that bitch Romanoff, we would've put him all back together – back to the '60's, when he was worth all the fucking trouble."

Rumlow's expression turns into steeled amusement, those eyes glinting again. "Good thing we still have the one down the hall. So glad you came, Cap."

Fire flares through Steve's body, turning everything red again. "Don't fucking touch him" roars out of his throat, and he's somehow thrown Rumlow across the room. He's somehow looped his shield across his arm, and he comes back to himself as he dashes towards Rumlow.

He can't stop himself from swinging the shield to block a punch –  _crack!_  Can't stop himself from bringing the edge of his shield at Rumlow's bare face –  _crunch!_ Can't stop himself from sinking his own fractured knuckles into Rumlow's neck. Can't stop himself from kicking away Rumlow's attempt at a kick. Can't stop himself from screaming words he can't even hear, from turning Rumlow's face liquid red, from pulling another knife and sinking it into a gap in the armor, somewhere Steve doesn't care to know.

Rumlow's back hits the hull, and Steve pushes every pound of his weight onto the hilt of that knife, before twisting it. Rumlow screams, teeth bloody, hands brutally battering at Steve's numb body. Something stings Steve's neck.

"Die," Steve hisses.

Sticky blood streams over his hands, making the knife hilt slippery. That's fine: he lets it go and sails a closed-fist punch into Rumlow's face, one after another after another.

Out of breath, Steve steps back and watches Rumlow drop to the floor – and smile a broken-tooth, red-tinged smile.

"We played a game, once. I told'em that if he screamed, I'd hurt you." Rumlow's words are stiff, slow, and lisped. Steve could stop him, could shut him up, but... But. "And I told you – if he didn't scream, you would, for a long, long time. No matter what you did, he wouldn't do it. And you know what I finally realized?"

At the last possible second, Steve's drowned, raging-hot instincts scream to  _move_ ,  _get away, go_.

Steve brings his arms up to block Rumlow's raising hand, and he even manages to sneak in a step backwards, but it's too late. Rumlow presses some sort of button on some sort of small device, and –

It's too late when the veins in his face bulge. It's too late when his lungs won't inflate. It's too late when every inch of his skin flushes  _cold_ and every muscle tenses to its breaking point. It's too late when his knees fold, body helplessly falling backward. It's too late when each and every nerve in his body ignites at once.

Rumlow once again stands over Steve, not a smirk or a smile in sight. "How much he loves you."

***

In April 2014, Barnes learned the layout of the standard helicarrier as if it were a language. He memorized primary, secondary, and tertiary access points to every room, closet, and area of the aircraft; configuration of every electrical system, propulsion plant, and aux service; locations and mechanisms of above-board and below-board elevators for weapons and aircrafts; and the recommended formation of security personnel and their checkpoints for every deck.

This helicarrier is older – but won't be completely different. It should be close enough to what he'd learned and memorized.

He purposefully walks down a dimly-lit auxiliary service hallway, until he comes to an access hatch near the top of the wall. Knife temporarily sheathed, Barnes climbs the stout access ladder, forces the hatch open, and crawls through into a human-sized, dark utility tunnel lined by dew-covered gray pipes.

As he walks, his shoulders brush the sides of the narrow tunnel; the tips of his short hair collects static from its low ceiling. The left-hand wall is marked with identifiers for each section of the deck: 9A, 9B, 9C, 9D-1, 9D-2. Control Room 3 lives in Section 9-H.

At that section, Barnes pries open a large access panel along the upper portion of the wall and silently sets it on the floor. He reaches through a nest of thickly bunched wires, conduits, and sensors to take ahold of two handles attached to an external panel.

He pulls it toward him, the panel making a soft  _click-clank_  sound as it jerks loose. Barnes holds still for a slow, long fifteen seconds, then gently, carefully maneuvers it through the curtain of wires. He sets it next to the first panel.

Squatted down, Barnes slinks through those wires, until he can see Control Room 3. He's far above the floor but far below the tall ceiling, peering out from the far end of the room to the left of the quiescent relay tower in the center.

Teetering on his knees, Steve's body leans against the floor-to-mid-wall windows near the main entrance. At first, Barnes wonders why he's not moving – but then he realizes that Steve is paralyzed. His face and hands pulse a deepening red, facial veins swollen into raw, cylindrical burrows.

Sheathed in shambles of thick metal, motherfucking Brock Rumlow stands in front of Steve, his oblivious back to Barnes. The slow tip of his serrated knife draws a crisscross of pronounced, ragged red lines across Steve's left arm.

_Will it feel good. Will you like it._

Cold rage cleaves into a single point of wrath:  _I'm going to kill you_.  _I'm going to fucking kill you._

Steve's glassy, bloodshot eyes briefly pass over Barnes, lingering long enough to communicate:  _I see you_. Something about the way Steve looks at him within those seconds screams  _get the chip, forget about me_.

The only answer is  _never without you_.

Barnes sheathes his knife.

He long-taps his comm four times – out of protocol, not worry.

He brings his rifle to bear.

His right eye twitches, vision blurring.

He's never regained feeling in the right side of his body. His hand's numb.

All he has to do is shoot.

Thick armor coats Rumlow's scarred body, with gaps at each joint. Barnes focuses on the gap in armor around Rumlow's neck. All he needs to do is shoot that gap: sever the spine or slice the jugular, who the fuck cares.

His eye twitches.

Barnes steadies the rifle atop a knee, loosens his numb hand, and breathes normally.

Rumlow makes another cut. Blood drips onto the metal floor. Steve's hands darken into a sickly purple. His eyes fill with blood from ruptured vessels.

Barnes takes aim. It's a simple shot – one of the easiest he's ever done. Down the sight, he sees Rumlow's pocked skin, even the dimples of his cervical spine.

He exhales and pulls the trigger.

His eye twitches. His fingers don't move smoothly.

The bullet ricochets off the armor, a mere two millimeters off.

_God damn it._

Immediately, Barnes drops to the ground, keeps that rifle drawn, and launches into a  _slow_ sprint toward them. His back spasms, but he's wholly prepared to fight this out with bullets, his hands, his legs, anything.

Rumlow turns full around: scarred, burned face beaten raw, a blood-matted eyebrow raised. "That's too bad."

Rumlow takes a step back, then wraps his metal-coated fingers through a tuft of Steve's hair, cruelly jerks his head back, and holds the blade of that serrated combat knife against the taut skin of Steve's throat.

Barnes skids to a stop.

Steve barely makes a sound; his chest doesn't move with breaths; his unrestrained arms don't fight. His shield lays ready next to his right foot.

 _What the hell did you do to him_.

Barnes doesn't dare move but he's calculating, as quickly and honestly as he can, the chance of him putting an  _accurate_ bullet between Rumlow's eyes before that knife spills blood.

"Look, Cap, your Bucky came. Just in time to watch you die." Rumlow looks to Barnes, steady, calm, controlled. "He can't breathe. He can't move. I don't even know if he can think right now. You should have come home. Was your freedom worth this?"

Barnes' right eye twitches.

Rumlow's lips contract into a twisted grin, eyes alight with a realization that turns to sick amusement. "It happened to you, too. Well, then."

What happens next shatters the world into fragile sheets of splintered glass.

From top to bottom, a wave of blue rolls through the cavernous room.

Tony's voice lights up Barnes' comm: "Peek-a-boo, I see you."

A moment later, the control room plunges into red-tinged darkness. Klaxons blare:  _Eee-ERR! Eee-ERR! Eer-ERR!_ A computerized woman's voice repeats:  _"Warning: stay clear." "Warning: stay clear."_

Rumlow breaks the window by Steve with a fist and shoves out the reinforced panels with a jagged, hectic kick. His hand still wrapped in Steve's hair, Rumlow dangles Steve's limp body above the opening – 34,000 feet of open air roaring and whipping below.

All Barnes can see is the tip-top of Steve's blond head.

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

His knife-wielding hand pointed at the control tower, Rumlow says, "That's going to deploy in two minutes, and the world down there ends. In five seconds, I let him drop. Five."

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Months and months ago, Naceri explained to him the anatomy of the emotional brain: how the amygdala works with the hippocampus and neocortex to process events and situations. She explained how HYDRA controlled his emotions, rewrote his life from the inside out, and protected themselves from him by continuously damaging his amygdala – by removing his ability to react emotionally before the other parts of his brain could rationally process information.

She told him why, for  _years_ , he hadn't felt the emotions behind his memories, why he hadn't felt fear in otherwise terrifying situations, and why he hadn't reacted to horrifying things like a human would and should.

Right this instant, Naceri could tell him why he doesn't take the time to make a rational decision: because there's no world without Steve, because what just happened is terrifying, and the primal, instinctive part of him only knows to do one thing:  _save Steve_.

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

"Four."

Barnes darts forward, toward the broken window, without a second thought for the relay tower–

"Three."

–or a second thought about getting so close to Rumlow without any plan to defend himself –

"Two."

–or a second thought about how this is absolutely, undeniably not only a power play, but a Big Fucking Trap.

"One."

Rumlow lets go and steps back, his open, splayed fingers wiggling in the air, that self-satisfied smirk plastered on his face.

***

Over the comm, two quick clicks of static precede a long dash. It means the first chip has not only been recovered but safely removed from the control room.

Clint smiles. "Can't beat that."

"It's a good team" perches on the tip of her tongue. It had been a good team. She says nothing at all and waits for the next set of clicks.

Thirty seconds pass. Her stomach drops.

A full minute. She reminds herself to relax her shoulders, to stay loose.

A minute thirty. Clint's eyebrows make a knot at the center of his forehead.

Two minutes. Natasha exhales a slow puff of air. Clint's palm squeaks from how he kneads his bow like a stress ball.

At three, they'll take the Command Deck. Natasha hand signals that plan to Clint, who confirms understanding with the universal A-okay hand sign.

Forty-three seconds later, the next set of clicks herald three long dashes. The  _third_  chip is safe. The second one should have been recovered moments before or after the first one. Unless...

"They decided to work together," Clint whispers, low enough that she can hardly hear him over the grumbling hiss of the HVAC system. "They're fine."

He means  _Cap doesn't fail_.

She doesn't argue, only because she agrees that, yes, Steve and James changed the plan to work together. It means James isn't doing well and never should have come – and so the world rests on the once-capable shoulders of a man who has spent two long years breaking clean in half.

"They're fine, Nat."

She nods to make Clint shut up: he has no idea.

Nevertheless: one more chip to go, then she and Clint are on.

Natasha counts down the time, butterflies twirling in her stomach like little girls in a room made of red. It's only the world teetering on a tightrope, and only her family whose fall will herald the whimper.

_Wrong business, Natalia._

One minute turns to two turns to – two clicks, four long dashes, one click, and four long dashes.

 _James._  That's James' assigned SOS code.

"Well, that's that," Clint remarks, already on his feet, bow at the ready. "Let's have some fun."

Natasha moves ahead without a word spared. Her teeth sink into the side of her cheek. James is on his own, no latitude in this plan for heroic attempts at reinforcement. All Natasha can spare him is an insignificant thought:  _take care of yourself._

_***_

Barnes dives to the broken window, the jagged edges impotent against the sleeve of his right arm and pant legs, and reaches out with his left hand. His fingers clutch Steve's shoulder, clenched so tightly that they gouge holes into Steve's skin.

"Steve!"

Barnes lodges his right knee against the hull of the helicarrier, enough to stop him from sliding over the edge and into—a long, cold fall. Panic knocks into him for a millisecond, but it can't, it can't do that right now.

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Barnes pulls Steve's boneless, ragdoll body up higher and high—

Something agonizingly painful tears through his body, sucks breath out of his chest, throws yellow-orange sparks from his left arm, and dims his vision into gray splotches. An EMP.

The plates of his left arm shift incongruently, knocking against each other and bleeding power, strength, and ability as the seconds scramble past. Steve hangs by shreds of skin.

"Just to make this fun," Rumlow says, amusement lighting up his voice. "Ignore me."

Barnes reaches out with his shaking right hand and scrambles to take ahold of Steve's armpit. His fingers won't bend all the way.

In Barnes' loose grasp, Steve's arm slips down to his elbow, the blood from a hundred cuts slick.

Terrified adrenaline pumps through Barnes' body, though not enough to make his hands work. "Steve – Steve, you have to hold on— Steve!"

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Steve's eyes don't open. He doesn't move. He doesn't respond. His facial veins have swollen into thick nightcrawlers; lips a deep blue; hand a dark, stippled purple.

Steve's bloody arm slips to the space between his ulna and radius.

"Steve!" he begs. "Steve, wake the fuck up!"

_Please. Please. You have to._

He wills his hand—either of them—to grip, to squeeze, to hold, to do  _something god damn well enough_ to let him pull Steve up—

From wrist to fingertips, Steve's hand slips away, leaving behind empty handfuls of Arctic air.

" _No_!"

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Time stands still.

Ice creeps through his legs, into his stomach, up his arm, and back down into his chest, freezing there, stopping his lungs.

Steve's body sinks into the inky, dark night, down and gone.

Steve's gone.

Steve's falling – 34,000 feet and counting, at least two minutes until he hits the ground.

 _Fuck_.

The rational part of his brain catches up.

Barnes brings his right hand up to his comm. "Tony, Steve fe–"

A metal-armored hand takes ahold of his right ankle and yanks him backward, moments before a ruthless metal-armored boot from out of nowhere collides with his ear.

He hears a  _crack_ and then himself groan. Lightning bolts shoot into his brain, splintering, splintering, splintering, and he can't think, the room doesn't spin more than it shakes, and his eyesight flickers in and out.

More important than anything: his comm shatters, its tinny noise cutting into empty silence.

_Steve._

***

Together, Natasha and Clint purposefully walk the length of the service tunnel, then exit into Deck Five. Natasha slips behind a soldier, breaks the neck, and leaves the body crumpled on the floor – no more sense left in attempting stealth.

 _Snickt-click._  Clint lobs an arrow at someone else. A soft, fleshy  _thump_ precedes a louder  _thud_.

"Yep – still got it," Clint breathes. "Just don't tell my kids."

He sounds hopeful about this mission. Silly.

A path of bodies trailing behind them, they enter a red-lit stairwell a moment before a wave-like flash of brilliant blue slinks through the compartment.

Tony's waiting voice fills her ear with "peek-a-boo, I see you."

HYDRA's preparing to kill the world. Their world. They have  _minutes_.

"We've got this," Clint says, nipping at her heels as they ascend two decks. "It's just like Sapohove. Remember that one?"

Natasha doesn't spare the time to stop and stare at him. Sapohove, 2010: in two kind words,  _complete disaster._

The comm crackles. James' voice comes through, loud, strong, and calm. "Tony, Steve fe—"

The radio spikes with a sudden onslaught of shrill noise.

Not even Tony spares the time to make a jab. "On it."

Rhodes makes up the difference. "Blackbird, what's your status?"

James doesn't respond.

"Blackbird, I repeat, what is your status? Cap?"

It doesn't matter, either way.

Natasha flattens her back against the hull, as Clint kicks through the door to the outer Command Deck. He lobs off an array of precisely-aimed arrows, while Natasha rolls low and shoots to kill a lot of people.

She calmly walks halfway down the corridor. Then, she bursts through an auxiliary access door into the inner Command Deck: the nerve center of the helicarrier…

…protected by a whirling, swirling, opaque haze of blue light.

Natasha glides to a quick stop, millimeters from the threshold. She steadies herself, squaring her stance, and realizes: there's no way through.

The only way to shut down the helicarrier is through that light.

And the only way to shut down that light is to use the controls housed in the inner Command Deck.

It's brilliant.

It's over.

Clint's open-palm hand settles on her back, meant to be comforting. It's not. It's a distraction.

There has to be a wa—

Clint pushes her, hard.

Natasha's gut clenches, every muscle tensing with inconsequential adrenaline, as a cool, minty sensation overtakes her.

An instant later, she blows out a frigid breath, its white cloud dissipating into fresh, sunlit Arctic air.

A dense fog hangs low.

A Faraday dome stretches above her head, its girders dirty-gray.

Skeletal buildings rise into the blue sky, their rusted-orange iron girders exposed and hollow. On those buildings: faded Cyrillic writing, too much of it missing to be able to read. A sun-bleached union hammer, emblazoned on a red, metal star.

Four, familiar buildings are brick and solid: three of them windowless, the fourth with a strip of narrow windows along its top-most floor.

In the distance, what reminds her of massive radio, satellite, and microwave towers shadow the landscape, with multi-story mooring brackets next to them.

The Cosmodrome.

"Well, this is familiar," Clint mutters, expression expectant but not one that Natasha notices.

He pushed her.

He sidelined them.

The mission is a failure.

Hot rage bubbles up through her body, releasing as a right hook that  _cracks!_ into Clint's jaw. He stumbles backward, a hand reaching to sooth his face.

Natasha shakes out her hand – and could scream.

 _Scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaape_.

In near-comic unison, Natasha and Clint turn toward the noise – it'd come from down a stout, rocky slope of green ground cover, bright alpines, and sharp edges. It's where James had parked the 1960-something go-fast boat, all of those years ago, its bottom scraping against the hard sand and polished, moss-covered stones of the shore.

It's only then that Natasha realizes: it's warmer than it should be. The morning sun shines, when this part of the Arctic doesn't have daylight, not in January.

This day, right now, looks exactly as it had in September 2016. And one of those four brick buildings doesn't have a charred hole blown into its side – a hole her own intel had confirmed still existed less than a year ago. A hole James had used five months ago to save his life.

Natasha stares at the slope, wondering – thinking – knowing it's not at all possible –

Three separate sets of careful, planned footsteps quietly  _crunch, crunch, crunch_ up the slope.

Without a word, Clint's hand wraps around her arm and tugs her inland.

Reeling, Natasha follows Clint deep into a winding labyrinth of concrete and debris heaps, slivers of sun-bleached metal, and jagged, cleft gray asphalt. On each side of them, deteriorated buildings loom: some corroded wall-to-wall, others strangely charred, and still others crumbled to their first few floors.

James' voice snakes through the debris. "It's a cosmodrome. I mean, it looks like Baikonur. Hold on."

Her own voice follows. "What?"

An impossible voice belonging to  _Sam_  chases Natasha and Clint around a bend in the debris. "It's just creepy. And I've seen creepy. This is, like,  _creepy_ creepy."

"You bring us to such nice places."

No matter how or why or  _when,_ Natasha knows what happens next. She and Clint have two minutes, tops, to move out of sight – before Sam startles and takes flight toward the buildings, before she follows, and less than eight hours before the entire island swarms with HYDRA.

Without words spared between them, she and Clint sprint down pitted, potholed asphalt, toward the cluster of four brick buildings.

***

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Left hand barely able to make a fist, right hand damn near worthless, Barnes hooks his left ankle around Rumlow's hand, pushes hard, and creates momentum to spin his body around, break Rumlow's grasp, and push himself to his feet.

Immediately, he retreats backward away from Rumlow, toward the relay, away from the broken window.

His right eye twitches, central vision blurry and spotted with gray dots. A high-pitched ring distorts his hearing, while a bubble of pain blisters behind the right side of his forehead.

_Not now._

There's a minute thirty left—maximum—until the relay engages. That doesn't leave time for a black out, for grief or worry, for anything except killing Rumlow.

Rumlow skitters into Barnes' line of sight and tosses his combat knife to the floor. Fists raised, Rumlow's smirk grows wider. "Congrats. By the time the relay goes, Cap'll be hitting ground. You've lost that touch of yours."

Seconds tick by. The klaxons blare. The computer repeats the warning.

Barnes wonders if that's the same touch that brought a helicarrier down on Rumlow's head, but he can't find half the words to ask.  _His_ time is running.

He  _does_ find a way to say three words, though; three fabulous words. "How're the knees?"

Rumlow's smirk fades into an expression of hatred. "They're great. Wonder if Cap'll know what hits him? You'd sort of know…right?"

Beyond that there's still every chance that Tony or Rhodes grabs Steve well before that happens, it's increasingly obvious that Rumlow is stalling.

With confidence that no longer belongs to him, Barnes strides forward. Knowing he can't rely on his fists, he ducks under the too-heavy punch Rumlow throws and transitions into an easy, powerful back kick that squarely connects with too-thick metal. It only serves to knock Rumlow a few steps forward.

Rumlow comes back at him with a flurry of punches—the guy's comfortable in the junkyard armor he's glued to himself, that's for sure—but no firearms, no knives, nothing lethal. Rumlow's hoping for another long revenge.

Barnes doesn't have time for that.

He blocks Rumlow's assaults and counters with his own strong kicks and half-assed elbow attacks, the clock ticking down, down, down.

A badly timed kick leads to a metal-fisted punch to Barnes' face (so: that's what that feels like), two sloppy steps backward, and a metal-sheathed arm around his neck. Rumlow kicks Barnes' feet out from under him, spins them around mid-air, and –

_Christ._

Rumlow lands heavy and hard on top of him, an arm crushing into his throat. Barnes spits out a cough, body jerking uselessly under Rumlow's weight.

"I'm here to bring you home, Seventeen. When I do – I get the machine.  _I_ get fixed, like  _you_ did, every time Cap killed you."

The hot hiss of Rumlow's breath boils against his neck, as hot as the scalding, furious scorch blistering through his chest.

"You won't remember them. This. Any of it. You're coming home. All is forgiven."

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Rumlow says it, like it's some big revelation, like Barnes hadn't figured it out two months ago. Like Barnes hasn't feared it since then.

"So, when we roll back Romanoff, and go collect Rogers, it won't matter to you. HYDRA can be merciful. Lucky you."

_Plink._

"Not HYDRA," Barnes replies. "Wouldn't know."

Rumlow's eyes widen into teacup saucers. "What did you—"

Barnes rips his left leg up, dragging it across the crude armor. With his knee planted against Rumlow's chest, he launches Rumlow backwards into the air and over Barnes's own head with a ferocious kick.

_Boom!_

_Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

_Thud._

Rumlow frantically screams, interspersed by agitated gasps of waning, damaged breaths. Even that is more than Barnes expected, what with a live grenade rolled down inside his chest armor.

Barnes gets up, glances at what's left of Rumlow's body, and leaves him writhing, moaning, bleeding, dying. It's that quicker, kinder death that he doesn't deserve.

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Barnes fishes his broken comm piece out of his ear. He snaps the cord, discards the earbud on the floor, and looks to the flashing-red relay tower. Time's running.

He sprints toward the tower and catapults himself up to the first catwalk railing. He relies on his misfiring left hand to catch the rail, but his fingers freeze mid-grasp. Quickly, he compensates with his right hand, those fingers barely bending in time and barely supporting his weight.

He swings his legs over the rail and feet-first onto the metal walkway. He runs to the ladder access and doesn't even bother climbing it: he squats low and jumps off of his left leg, sailing ten feet high. He kicks off a rung, gains another five feet, and lands smoothly next to the control panel.

 _Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR. Eee-ERR_.  _"Warning: stay clear."_   _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.  _Eee-ERR_.

Barnes reaches out toward a clear, glass housing. Inside—

Barnes spins the multi-faceted housing, like a sunglass tower at a store. One chip, two chips, three chips: all the chips. The other two relays had been – who the hell knows, but definitely, definitely decoys.

All three algorithm chips sit safely inside  _this one_.

"Fucking Christ," he bites, as he pushes open the first glass door and –

" _Warning: engaged."_

Fingers stretched toward the first chip, Barnes' body suddenly turns weightless, the floor  _whooshing_  from under him. The tippy-top of the tower slams into his back, pushing him down, down, down, face down into the metal catwalk.

A violent, jerked stop rattles his body. For one second exactly, he thinks that's it: whatever happened is over and done.

Then the catwalk splits apart: one end dropping one way and the other end dropping the other way. He tumbles into darkness, hitting an inclined, sheet metal platform hard on his right shoulder. In his mind's eye, he pictures it as an inverted funnel – from hell.

He slides down—nothing,  _nothing_ except dark black  _anything_  below him.

Barnes semi-frantically reaches up with his left hand, his fingers bending but refusing to do more than uselessly scrape and  _clang_ down the metal. After seventy-four years, HYDRA's arm is finished.

As quickly as it began, the sheet metal ends, depositing him into a dark cavity. Face-first, he clashes into cold, hard glass.

The usual happens: lightning up his skull, splintering pain, flashes and golden sparks floating through the black fog that used to be precise, superhuman peripheral vision. His central vision fills with dark splotches, fading as an intense, tearing pain builds between his forehead and right temple. Nausea creeps through his stomach, threatening to turn into body-wracking heaves.

He brings his right hand up to his forehead, finding an infinitesimal amount of relief from the mounting pressure in his temple.

A few seconds, he tells himself. In a few seconds he'll get up and find a way to finish the mission.

Red-orange flashes in front of his eyes. He peers down, so far down, through the gray slips of clouds and sees the fiery tails of two sizzling cruise missiles, right on target. The nation below doesn't like them up here.

This time, there won't be a river.

There won't be a beaten face of a person he'd once called  _brother_.

Steve's blood is still caked on his hands.

***

"Tony, Steve fe—"

Without sparing a single question about  _how, why_ , or even  _where_ , Tony finishes Barnes' sentence by way of sheer fucking common sense: there's no other reason for Barnes to ask the aerial component of this mission for help with whatever happened to Steve – and the way Barnes said "fe" only sounds like one word.

Tony blasts over the top of the helicarrier and swoops down the starboard side, hugging the hull with practiced, laser-focused precision. JARVIS lights up his HUD with a bright green diagram of the control room overlaid by real-time imagery of a broken lower window.

Bingo. That answers the "how," while the two intensely fighting people Tony glimpses inside the control room answers the "why."

Tony rockets past the window and dives headfirst into the shadowy, cloud-drenched night. "JARVIS, give me eyes on him!"

"Scanning."

Doing the math in his head—the seconds between Steve falling and Barnes radioing, the distance Steve has likely fallen since then—Tony increases speed and pushes the angle of his dive to the extreme limits of the suit. All he needs is JARVIS to tell him  _where_.

"JARVIS!"

He'd yelled too soon: JARVIS loads an orange waypoint into Tony's HUD, complete with a distance indicator marked in meters. Give or take, Steve is only 200 meters below Tony, after a soft jag to the right.

Tony adjusts his bearing and guns it. "Count me down, JARVIS."

As JARVIS counts down in increments of 50, Tony averts his eyes from his HUD and scans the inky sky for stars and spangle. It's a stupid, old joke he says in his head, knowing full well that Steve's wearing all-black – the perfect camouflage for an unexpected, freefalling jaunt through 34,000 feet of dead air.

"Fifty meters," JARVIS announces, at the same time a shock of messy blond hair gives Steve away.

Less than a second later, Tony dives far under Steve, reverse thrusts into a dead stop, and grabs Steve by the waist with one arm. He could never do that awesome move with a normal human, not without liquefying their pretty insides.

Tony quickly reaches around with his other arm to protectively secure Steve against the front of Tony's suit.

"Cap?"

No answer. No movement. No anything.

Tony blasts back toward the helicarrier, aiming for the blacktop. "JARVIS, give me vitals."

Steve's vitals pop into Tony's HUD: respiration, 0; pulse, 150; blood pressure, 204/50. Altogether entirely terrible.

"Okay – injuries?"

JARVIS rattles off a short list of superficial injuries, like a gunshot wound, broken bones, arm lacerations, and a dislocated shoulder, but also zeroes in on something that doesn't belong to Steve – or anyone but Stark Industries. A 3-D diagram of that something spins in the right corner of Tony's HUD.

"On his neck, Sir."

"God damn it," Tony hisses. It's the paralysis device the US military hadn't wanted – the one Obi had used on him back in '08. The only saving grace here is that Tony can do this: "JARVIS, turn it off."

As soon as the device  _clunks_ against Tony's arm and disappears into the clouds below, Steve's chest expands with a forceful, desperate shallow breath, followed by a series of hacking, dry coughs.

"Relax, Cap. I've got you. I've got you."

Tony sets down on the blacktop of the helicarrier, taking relative cover behind a tall stack of gray storage containers. He lays Steve on the hard asphalt, taking care to protect his head.

"Steve, talk to me. Cap." Tony lightly taps Steve's face. "Cap. What happened?"

Eyes closed, Steve spits a short story between frantic breaths. "Ru—rumlow.  _Rumlow_. Bucky—"

Steve rapidly blinks, flips his body over, and somehow collapses to his knees and palms without ever actually getting up. He stares in the general direction of the control rooms, nine decks down, and Tony doesn't  _think_ Steve's added x-ray vision to his list of –

"Bucky."

It would be nothing short of a disaster to tell Steve what Tony thinks: Barnes is dead or worse. The cut-off sentence, the fight Tony had glimpsed on Deck Nine, and the complete lack of communication since tells one of two stories, neither good.

Natasha and Barton need to take the Command Deck, because that final chip is as good as HYDRA's.

"Don't worry—"

"Uh, Tony?" Rhodey interrupts, his impeccable timing stopping Tony from telling Steve an outright, unforgiveable lie. "Port side, now. We've got incoming."

Body shaking from the inside out, hands trembling, nose and ears bleeding, arms cut to shreds, and his tattered right shoulder held protectively tight against his body, Captain America scrapes out a clear and present order: "Go."

Tony looks into Steve's blood-filled eyes and draws in a breath, years of shit to be said with no time left. He activates his helmet and blasts off into the sky.

***

Like two contrary children, Natasha and Clint scamper across the open, concrete courtyard at the conflux of the four brick buildings: three short, windowless and one tall with windows only along the uppermost story.

The dim growl of Sam's old wingpack hums in the near distance. He's spooked, and he's coming, the other her—Romanoff—sprinting close behind. Most importantly: Sam is only seconds away.

Natasha and Clint hurdle over a crumbling concrete barrier and silently, swiftly dart behind one of the short buildings. Trained for this, they both come to complete, still stops: no noise, no movement, barely any breaths.

 _Click-click-click_.  _Thud, thud, thud_.

Sam's touched down.

"Come out!" Sam's frenetic, nervous voice booms through the courtyard. "Now! I fucking saw you!"

_Bang-bang-bang-bang!_

Shards and bits of brick explode past their heads. Sam's shooting right at them, as if he knows that they're there…

Natasha remembers: he hadn't taken off and engaged for the hell of it. He'd seen someone.

Them. He'd seen  _them_.

_How…_

"I said:  _I know you're there_." Sam's tone is more nervous, less controlled. He's armed for a small war: multiple grenades, an assault rifle, and at least three handguns, as Natasha recalls from that morning on the boat. "Come out,  _now_."

Sam's boots  _crinkle_ and  _crackle_ across the worn concrete, inching toward them.

Taking Sam down in a fight isn't a problem, certainly not between both her and Clint. But: that hadn't happened in September 2016. She doesn't know what it means if it happens  _now_ , this time.

Romanoff's voice echoes between the buildings, mixed together with the thumps of her rapid steps. "Sam! Sam!"

Sam's footfalls stop and pivot. "Someone's back there!"

"No one's back there." A beat. Natasha remembers the decision she made right then, finalized when she noticed Sam's blown pupils, sweat-tinged skin, and fearful stress bounding across every tense muscle. "Barnes checked. We're fine. Wanna put your gun down?"

Sam had furiously shaken his head, even as he'd slowly backed away:  _crinkle, crackle, crinkle, crackle_. "You're lying."

Hand's half-raised, she'd matched his every step; in the back of her mind, she'd willed James to get the hell over here. "No, Sam. Barnes checked. Steve isn't here. We need to leave."

Sam had hesitated, sifting through the effects of the fog: head shaking "no," eyes saying "please."

She had tapped into an old trick of the trade, when working with veterans: "Back to the boat, Wilson."

Following orders was hard-wired: no question, no fuss, no muss.

It'd worked. Sam had walked toward her, toward the broken road back toward the shoreline, back toward whatever the hell was keeping James so occupied.  _Crinkle, crackle. Crinkle, crackle._

Clint catches her attention, questions bubbling in his eyes. She shakes her head: in a minute. In a minute, it'll be over for seven and a half slithering, endless hours.

"We're leaving?" Sam asks, voice between relief and distrust. "For real."

He'd gotten close enough for her to take the back of his arm with her hand. Close enough for them to walk a couple meters down the road, away from the buildings, back toward Barnes and the boat –

Above their heads, the dirty-white Faraday cage groans, bending with a microburst of strong Arctic wind.

Clint glances upward, worry  _not_ knotting the space between his eyebrows – but his eyes rolling, impatience suddenly clear in his expression.

Natasha closes her eyes, waiting and knowing.

"Get away from me!" Sam shrieks –  _crinklecrackle, crinklecrackle, crinklecrackle, scraaaaape_.

"Sam!"

"NO!"

 _Click-click-click –_  wings extending –  _crinkle, crackle, crinkle, crackle, crinkle, crackle_  – Romanoff running after him, toward the northwest building –  _BANG!_

In the flurried chaos, Natasha hears the  _crunch!_ of Sam's shoulder hitting a steel door at full speed, the squeaking scrape of old, rusted hinges suddenly opening for the first time in years, and the  _click-click-click_  of Sam's wings folding away.

She'd grabbed Sam's shoulder, just in time for him to whip around, hands clawing at her neck and hands, before pushing her down a stupidly placed stairwell.

_SLAM!_

_Click-click-click._

The door flaps shut, a hollow echo winding through the courtyard.

In the sky, Sam spirals upward, as high as the top of the tallest building – the official report has it at thirty-five stories – before diving through one of the broken-glass, emptied frames. That's where he stays, until he jumps out the opposite side, with James flinging himself out after him. Until this entire mission unravels from "bad situation" into "catastrophic hell."

Natasha breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. The air freezes her lungs, but in a way she appreciates. With that done, she slides to the ground, where weeds and grass grow through thick cracks in the manmade surface.

"We went back in time." Out loud, it sounds foolish. Out loud, it doesn't make sense. "Why would HYDRA send us here for this?"

Clint kneels down, meets Natasha's eyes, and loops a finger under the neck of her combat jacket. He fishes out her gold arrow necklace, then plucks it right off her neck. "Not HYDRA. They gone? For now?"

"What— Yes."

She'd taken cover in the northwest building, intending to come right back out, find James, find Sam, and  _leave_ – but the fog had been stronger in that building than out here. Within minutes, she'd seen enough—hallucinated enough—to send her into the nauseating, winding depths of its hallways.

She wonders why that fog hasn't started speaking to her yet. In 2016, it'd been almost immediate.

"Okay."

Clint crunches around the corner, across the concrete barricade, and into the courtyard. As if he knows exactly what he's doing and why, when he should be the most confused and rattled of them both.

Natasha twists and pushes herself up into a long lunge. She hops over the barricade and follows Clint to an empty space in front of Sam's building.

Clint drops the necklace on the ground. He smooths away dirt and debris, ensuring the gold metal is easily noticeable.

That necklace.

Standing inside a cozy hotel room in Kiruna, Sweden, James had fished that necklace out of his pocket. As she'd plucked the broken chain from his fingers, he'd said, "It's the only reason I found either of you."

Sam had loudly yawned and wandered unsteadily toward the bathroom – hopefully, to take a shower and wash away the stink of the island and the old must of Hamningberg. Something that wouldn't have killed James to have done, as well.

More important than a shower: "You seem okay. Better than you should."

James had drawn in a life-tired breath and shrugged. She'd waited for his penchant lie of "I'm fine," but that hadn't come, not right then. Instead, he'd shaken his head with miniscule wobbles, fear, vulnerability, and  _trust_ splattered on his face. "It's where they did it."

Where HYDRA had killed a kid from Brooklyn named Bucky Barnes. Or so he'd thought.

Clint hasn't been with SHIELD since 2012 – and has barely returned her texts and calls since 2014. He hasn't had access to their reports. He shouldn't know what that necklace means for today.

Natasha steps back, instinctual caution telling her  _this is wrong_. Her palm rests on the butt of her sidearm, ready but not prepared to draw it, aim it – at  _Clint_.

"Why did you push me?"

"What, you think I'm crazy?" Clint derails, not so much defensive as inexplicably amused.

Head dipped low, he steps forward into her space, something unbalanced in his eyes. "It took Tony two months to figure out you came here. We went to find you and Sam. Tony, Rhodey, me. The island was empty, like this."

Clint gestures at the silent buildings and the standstill of the bleached, muted landscape. "We didn't find you, though. Not anyone. Nothing. Their suits wouldn't work, and they left in the jet, to get distance from this dome."

Clint waves at the tangle of dirty girders above their heads.

"I stayed here – to look for you." His eyes turn distant, telegraphing the end of his story before he says, "No one came back."

Natasha doesn't move her hand away from her sidearm. Maybe because she's putting it together in her own head: her Clint is at home with his family, and this Clint lost everything in the other world.

"I came for  _you_." Clint looks at her again, his distance replaced by fervor. "Only for you."

Maybe she doesn't trust it – but. "That's not possible."

A sudden, deep smile pulling at his cheeks, Clint approaches closer, head tilted in exaggeration. He waves a hand toward the shore. "Oh? And what's this? Typical Thursday? Used to be tacos."

"Well, you've been gone for a while." Natasha bites the inside of her cheek, thinking through the  _impossibility_ of what Clint's saying – compared to the  _impossibility_ of all of this. "How are you here?"

Clint steps back and spits out a laugh. "Ever been to Shakespeare Garden?"

No, and that's not even barely related to the question she'd asked. She believes his story and believes he's broken. How and why doesn't matter, not really. It only matters that they're here – and that…

Natasha shakes her head, pushes past Clint, and tracks back toward the debris piles.

"Where're you goin'?!"

For now, only one place.

"Nat! The— Fine. Go."

Clint's voice goes quiet, but he trails languidly behind her, every step of the way back near the shore, through each inch of the maze of debris.

James lays unconscious: prone and sprawled, right arm awkwardly pinned under his body. His left arm glints under September's bright Arctic sun. It's angled over his head, propped atop the pieces of an old, rusted satellite dish.

Behind her, Clint plops down atop a slab of concrete, his ass missing a rusted barb of rebar by inches. "I hate this place."

Natasha ignores him and toes James' inert body with her boot. Totally and completely limp, his body damn near rolls over, before she steps back and watches him ragdoll back into place.

Like when she and Sam had carried him out of the safehouse in Hamningberg, deposited him into the backseat of a small car, and driven all the hours to Kiruna without him once stirring.

"In college, this is when we'd draw dicks on his face," Sam had said. "A mustache, maybe."

Then, she'd been too exhausted to crack the barest smile at the idea. Her response of "can you drive?" had killed Sam's smile. Kinder than what HYDRA had done to him.

Natasha leaves James alone – knowing precisely how his time on this island ends today – and regards Clint. She tries again. "How."

She expects him to make a "how the fuck should I know?" face and shrug. He doesn't. In his clenched hands, his bow creaks again.

"He didn't…"

Natasha cocks a questioning, threatening, daring eyebrow.

"Tony was adamant he—" Clint's chin gestures at James, "—turned you two over to HYDRA. Had been planning it the whole time."

Tony's old words ring in her ears:  _You're sure? Sure enough to bet Steve's life?_

Kinder than she could be, Natasha shakes her head. "No. And you know that."

The bow creaks again, Clint's jaw clamped as tightly as his fists. "None of you made it back from here. I'm supposed to change that. Fix it."

"Yes, we did" on the tip of her tongue, Natasha freezes, head cocking. Her gaze doesn't waver from his face: waiting, searching, yearning for his serious façade to crack and reveal the bad joke.

He's as serious as she's ever seen. As worried.

Instead, she wonders if the headstone of their future hadn't been Death Valley at all. Not there, but here, right here.

***

Tony sinks into a low, rapid dive, eyes and waypoint focused on dual, orange-tailed missiles sizzling toward the helicarrier.

"Tony—" Bruce's voice cuts into Tony's comm, "—those can't hit the carrier. We're picking up significant increases in gamma radiation. I don't know what a direct missile strike will do, but it won't be good."

No shit.

Also: "What do you mean – with the radiation?" Tony asks.

Bruce almost hesitates. "It's the same as Seattle."

_God damn it._

Rhodey doesn't waste a second. "Widow – blow the engines."

Tony closes in on the missiles, Rhodey relatively close next to him, and decides: they can safely neutralize the missiles from here. No need to reroute them somewhere else.

"Romanoff?" Rhodey prods.

No response. In Tony's HUD, a small live image of the helicarrier  _doesn't_ light up with the glory of four exploding engines.

"Hawkeye?" Rhodey tries.

Tony's gut sinks: they've lost all four of them. No one's left.

Neither Tony nor Rhodey fire on the missiles. Sometimes, they end up on the same wavelength without talking: the mission plan has been dismantled bit by bit, person by person, and these missiles might be the only chance they have at stopping HYDRA.

Thing is: sometimes Bruce is right there with them. "No, kill the missiles, guys. They can't hit the helicarrier."

Both missiles zoom straight past both Tony and Rhodey, on track and on target for the belly of the carrier. Tony and Rhodey give them a narrow berth – still within striking distance, but…

From the cool safety of Headquarters a couple thousand miles away, Bruce's voice raises, too loud for a comm. "It's five million or the worl—"

Rhodey cuts Bruce off and forces Tony into a private channel. What a dick. "We can take the engines. It'll force a retreat, and then we neutralize it in the other world."

"JARVIS, time until impact?" Tony demands to know.

"Seven point eight seconds."

They don't have the time for an in-depth review and conversation about this. "Done. Kill the missiles, then attack the engines."

"Copy that."

Together, they take aim, repulsors charging and then firing. Neither of them stick around to see how spectacularly those missiles explode: they tear back toward the helicarrier, then split off in a practiced attack formation.

Tony soars toward the back ass of the ship, while Rhodey surges to the forward engines. It should only take one shot each to ignite the charges left by Natasha and Barton. Easy as cheesecake, hold the cherries.

Tony roars up the side of the helicarrier, the metal of his suit inches from the hull, before blasting high above Engines 1 and 2, two mini-missiles primed and ready to –

"Go," Tony growls.  _And take this fucker down_.

Far ahead of him, Engines 3 and 4 explode in a billowing fury of red and orange fire. Rhodey spirals into the sky, deftly evading the blowback and defensive artillery fire.

Engines 1 and 2… don't do that. The mini-missile delivered to each sends metal shards and broken pieces pinwheeling into the air, but the engine housings remain intact – and operational.

"JARVIS—"

"No explosive charges detected," JARVIS responds, always a step ahead.

Either Barton didn't plant them, or HYDRA found and removed them. Only one of those options makes any—

"Sir, incoming—!"

A HEAT anti-tank projectile hits Tony square in the chest. He sees it, then feels it, moments before it explodes.

As he falls and tumbles through inky, dead air, fractured armor  _on fucking fire_ , cold heat roaring against his blistering skin, Tony realizes that projectile was made for him.

The last thing he sees is an explosion of swirling, yellow-orange light, from the bottom of the helicarrier straight down to the gleaming city below.

***

Barnes doesn't see the missiles explode two kilometers from the helicarrier. He loses that time.

He comes to with missile casing fragments pelting against the helicarrier's hull and thick glass below him, moments before a flurry of supersonic shockwaves rattle the panes.

Those panes  _creak_  and  _moan_. Tiny, invisible splinters  _crackle-crackle-crackle_ along the crystallites. His heart  _thump-thumps_ , skipping a beat, then propelling into a race against an invisibly ticking clock – of the glass giving way, of him falling down, down, down.

_Steve._

Down below, the pinprick city lights of a hundred buildings sparkle, contrasted by the night sky. Hundreds of thousands or even millions live down there; he wonders if they know about them up here. He thinks of the other world, where no one had known: a blink and gone.

_Not here._

Barnes pushes himself up, ignores the tumbling fear of the glass floor giving way, and flips on the flashlight clipped to his vest. He fans the powerful light across the space.

It's enormous: at least 30 feet across. The entire floor is a geodesic, bowl-like dome made of tempered, triangular glass panels. Ten feet above his head, three large gray cylinders lower into place, barely a sound made.

Like a compound microscope, the cylinders soundlessly rotate on a black metal nosepiece, the first one replaced by the second, and the second one replaced by the third. The third one locks into place precisely above the apex of the dome. Its helix-tip sizzles with long tendrils of yellow-orange light.

One of those tendrils extends longer than the others and curls toward him: gentle somehow. Desperate somehow. He steps backward and pulls his body away, avoiding whatever the hell it is. Inexplicably, he thinks of Shakespeare Garden –

The black luminaire, where his mom fixed his collar.

The leaning, red tulips, lining the cobblestone path.

The brass drinking fountain, where Becca split her lip.

The sunlight filtering through the cherry blossoms, the same way as they had twelve years apart, between ages 8 and 20 – back then, a lifetime, before he learned to know better.

A warm feeling crawls through his chest.

Barnes blinks and checks his watch: twelve seconds gone. That tendril is  _inches_ from his face, reaching, stretching, lurking.

He takes another step back and  _has to fucking end this_.

As far as he can see above the cylinders, infinite darkness stretches upward – no light at the top. As assumed, the walls  _are_ an inverted funnel, perfectly smooth, no handholds. No ladder. No service access. No way out.

Barnes shines the light across the central cylinder. All three of them are large enough to fit a human and then some—each one eight feet wide and at least fifteen feet tall—which might mean there's a way inside of them to shut this down.

He steps around to the back and ducks under the tips of the other two cylinders. The tendril trails after him, slow and sluggish, but almost alive, almost sentient. His light skims a "danger: do not enter authorized personnel only" sticker above a –

Without warning, light shines from above. Barnes looks up and sees how deep down in the belly of the helicarrier he is – five, six entire decks at minimum. He won't be able to climb that.

A thunderous  _clang_  echoes into the chamber, followed by a long, vibrating  _brrrrrrrrrring_.

Uncontrolled, Rumlow bashes into the glass floor and lays there, unmoving, as a long, deep crack splinters across the surface of the dome.

An intense line of panic dissects Barnes' body. It's not an  _if,_ at this point: that glass breaking is the only certain future. At 34,000 feet, that's a long time to free fall, a lot of time to think, a lot of time to know  _I'm going to die_.

_Steve._

Barnes focuses on the danger sign and the lever handle next to it. It's only five meters above him: one good jump, one good grab, and then – well. He'll find out.

Rumlow rolls over onto his back. Sick-sounding, frothy wet laughs bubble out of his bloody mouth. "Die."

 _Click_.

***

Past the debris piles that pepper the shore, beyond the skeletal structures, around the cluster of brick buildings, and down a curved, barren patch of land, Natasha and Clint settle on the second-level of a vacant, disintegrating concrete lookout tower.

Surrounding them, fallen rocket moorings for two launch vehicles; rusted radio towers and mammoth satellite dishes, paint peeling and metal dangling; a mangled runway consumed by time and weather; and a bleak, beige plot of land that crumbles toward the northern shore.

It occurs to her that they could collect James, then Clint could find Romanoff and she could find Sam. A ready, capable boat waits for them, with enough remaining gasoline to get distance from the dome and allow them to call Stark. HYDRA would never know and would never come. Simple.

She says as much to Clint.

"Is that how it happened?" he asks, though he sounds as if he already knows her answer.

Natasha pulls her knees to her chest and studies him. The purple-red splotches under his eyes and the weary lines drawn deep by his mouth add unforgiving depth to his story – a story she believes.

"No," she replies.

"Whatever happens here – you've lived it. You just didn't know."

About that. "I never saw you. Sam never mentioned you."

While James narrowly made it to the jet, out of his mind with memories, a head injury, and the island's cruel drug. He wouldn't have noticed Clint.

That drug: still, nothing. Maybe it only works once. Maybe she'll never know why.

Clint shrugs. "Don't know what to tell you. What's the plan?"

She's been considering that. If getting out of here now isn't a possibility, then… "I don't know what goes wrong."

Clint lifts an eyebrow. "Besides everything?"

That's worth a glare but she doesn't spare the time to give it. He's not wrong. "I don't know what 'going right' is supposed to look like."

He scrunches his nose, rolls his shoulders, and relaxes against the crumbly wall. "Walk me through what happens."

She doesn't exactly know. She'd spent these hours in the northwest building, drugged and paranoid. She barely remembers finding James, beyond watching him snap his own wrist. After – HYDRA stormed the building. She fought and tried to flee, while James obediently, blankly followed, not lifting a single finger against a single enemy combatant. There hadn't been a way out: too dark, too many soldiers, too confusing. Then – the explosion that had created an easy exit, with Sam and his wings at the ready.

Natasha explains all of that to Clint, following up with, "Sam told me that HYDRA created the hole in the building. He thought by accident."

In hindsight… Natasha glances at Clint's mechanical quiver, full of an assortment of arrows, including the explosive kind.

Clint lets out a long, clarifying breath – not frustrated. Tired, maybe. Restless. "Okay. Figure we just have to kill a lot of scary goons and make sure there's a way off the island. How hard could that be?"

Depends.

"A jet," Natasha thinks to mention. "We escaped in a jet."

Like so many times before—Budapest, Sapohove, New York—she and Clint can improvise. They're pretty good at—

 _I only came for you_ , he'd said.

Natasha doesn't realize she's staring at him, until he cocks his eyebrows up, eyes wide with growing apprehension.

"What?" he tentatively asks.

"You kidnapped me," she realizes out loud, the thought only solvent as it leaves her tongue.

Clint squirms, trying to be apologetically charming, a glimmer of his old humor failing to find its mark. He drops the act. "I should've come, when you asked, when you said they—"

When she'd called him, said HYDRA had Steve, and  _begged him_ to help. He  _should have_ been with them, every step of the way in 2016, but he had a different family. A more important one she had never, would never begrudge him.

So, she doesn't care about that. She cares that he's trying to blow up the topic.

Ice cold, Natasha pins him with a stare. "What is this."

He changes the topic again, as if he's tapping the buttons of a television remote.

"My comm didn't work here." Clint points up at the dome. "Not even with JARVIS. Two hours after Tony and Rhodey left, two pieces of a helicarrier with four smoking engines crashed out on the northern horizon. I watched it from right over there."

Clint points at a nearby radio tower, its shadow casting darkness over his face.

She doesn't care about the other world's helicarrier, or what he'd seen of it, but she can imagine: fractured decks, spilling debris, metal on liquid fire. Two lifeless, smoldering halves of a behemoth descending through the overcast sky, slipping past the horizon, and crashing into the unforgiving depths of the Barents Sea. Slowly sinking, down, down, down to rest at the jagged bottom of the ocean floor.

If that helicarrier had the same machines they were trying to stop in 2019, then –

Natasha understands how this world had ended. It hadn't been HYDRA's mistake, or HYDRA's bad plan. It had been Tony and Rhodes, doing only what they knew to do.

She knows how the rest of them survived: the underground shielding that protected her, James, and Sharon in the Scablands base. Likely replicated here, Death Valley, and in who knows how many other installations around the world. HYDRA's failsafe,  _just in case_ , taught to every agent trained by the Winter Soldier.

The entire world gone, except for those lucky HYDRA soldiers safe inside their bases.

Natasha's stomach turns.

"I waited for days. Nowhere to go, no way to get there. Then, about a day ago, I walked out of that building—" Clint points at one of the shorter brick buildings, then casually stretches his body until his spine cracks, "—and ended up in Shakespeare Garden in Central Park. Some chick was there."

Because it's Clint, Natasha screws up her face into the dirtiest of looks, then grasps how normal this situation has become in the last few hours. "'Chick'?"

Clint either ignores the disapproval or completely misses it. "Curly red hair, freckles, darker skin tone. Anna somebody. Kinda looked like you. Told me to fix this."

Natasha's eyes narrow, thoughts tumbling. Anna Barnes—curly red hair, freckles, looked like Natasha because James "might have a type"—has been dead since the 1940's.

Besides that. "Why send you to Headquarters? Why then?"

Clint's bow creaks under his hands  _again_. He's liable to break it clean in half. More than that, his eyes dance around her, looking anywhere else. There's nowhere to look, not on this inhospitable island.

"I'm sorry."

He means: the helicarrier mission had to go a certain way. She knows him well enough, even after all these years, to  _know_ that, for a dead certain fact.

Chilled, Natasha searches his face, eyes bouncing as she puts scraps and pieces together into… "What did you do."

Clint's brow quivers, a blink-and-miss-it twitch of a singular muscle. "What I had to. To get my family back. If I fix this…"

Natasha can't tear her eyes from Clint.

"—I get them back. My kids, Nat." His voice quakes, eyes redden, jaw tight: all the signposts of a different world than hers. "My kids."

Natasha doesn't know what it means for the people on a helicarrier two years from now. She doesn't know what it means for Clint, or even for herself. She doesn't know how "fixing" today will ensure anything.

Clint wipes his nose with a shoulder sleeve and blinks rapidly. She doesn't miss his red, exhausted eyes.

"We still have four hours," Natasha says, only because his exhaustion is becoming contagious. She doesn't want this on her shoulders. She doesn't want any of this. "Get some sleep."

A hint of relief crosses his face, as if he was ready and waiting for her to condemn him. Maybe she should – without knowing, not exactly, what for. There'll be time for that.

Clint slumps into the peeling corner, concrete crumbling onto his shoulders. Everything here is crumbling.

Within five minutes of closing his eyes, his breaths even into a slow, steady rhythm, all of his trust in her laid bare.

Meanwhile, she wraps her arms around her knees and gazes into the distance, all the way to the debris near the southern shore.

She thinks of three bodies back home, neatly reposed together in nice, clean drawers.

She thinks of Nick's body next to them, their little morgue filling up quickly.

She thinks of Sam—the other Sam—and the body James had found in Death Valley. "I buried him," James had once said, "as close to home as I could find."

She thinks of what failure here means: Steve's love twisted into mindless hate, James dead by his own hand, and herself willing to violate anyone to fulfill a want. The world emptied, in every last way that matters.

The hours drag into a long crawl toward a vile eventuality, until Natasha's cracked watch face tells her that the silent, suffocating quietude of this island will be broken any time now.

Next to her, Clint still sleeps deeply, propped uncomfortably in that corner. His bow and quiver wait next to him.

Above, the metal dome girders groan and creak, slightly bending in the wind. Beyond it, the sun hangs far in the westerly skies.

Natasha has the perfect, hidden sightline to the shore. She watches James stiffly stand, check his watch, doubletake, then check the sun's position.

Dread pulls her gut stiff.

Rifle aimed, James wanders to the top of the slope, body tension writing an easy story to read: he'd thought they'd left him behind. Natasha watches him pivot and gaze toward the four buildings, that tension bleeding into knowing apprehension.

He'd found Sam, saved Sam, then come straight for her, HYDRA nipping at his heels. Not too long now.

She wonders what the other one, the dead one, had done. Which building he'd gone into. If he'd found one of them, or if he'd tripped an alarm, or if he'd seen either of them ever again.

James purposefully traverses the debris field, his eyes carefully scanning every visible vantage point along the island. Even from this distance, he comes off as calculating, efficient, aloof, and singularly focused – everything he hadn't yet unlearned.

Before he clears the debris and starts along the open path toward the buildings, Natasha smoothly slinks down behind the crumbly wall. As far as she knows, he never explored out this far. He won't find them here.

Flat on her stomach, Natasha peeks through a hole in the wall, finds him, and watches as he decides between walking toward the buildings or toward this lookout and the surrounding towers. Unsurprisingly, he turns toward the buildings and reaches them within a minute.

He stops and stands in the middle of the square: no idea where to go, until that necklace gleams in the fading sunlight. He goes right to it, picking it up, pocketing it, and then tilting his head back to peer up the imposing, hopeless length of Sam's building.

She can hear what was likely his one and only thought:  _fuuuuuuck_.

He draws the CZ-75 that Steve eventually used to kill him, checks the light, visibly steels himself, and pushes open the door with the barrel. He disappears inside: triggering their clock, with forty-five minutes at most until HYDRA arrives.

Natasha nudges Clint awake with her foot.

He groans, stretches, and yawns, eyes closed for many long seconds. "They here?"

"Soon."

He reaches the short distance to his bow, takes it, and looks at her, something on his mind. "I'm sorry for all this. I should've come."

She doesn't have the heart to tell him that he's sorry for the wrong person. "Today is what matters."

He gives her an uninspired nod, this place and his world weighing heavy. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you."

She doesn't let that one go as easily. Too numb and worried to be angry, she nonjudgmentally asks, "Why didn't you?"

Clint swallows, eyes darting beyond her to the buildings, then back to her. "Because he has to—"

"Deploy your wings! Sam! Your fucking wings!" James. Frantic.

 _CRUNCH!_ Metal crumples and glass shatters. An old car just got flattened, the bell tolling the oncoming swarm of HYDRA.

"I'm fine. I'm fine. Shit." James again.

"No, you're – are you? Are you okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You should've let— Thank you." Sam.

Clint doesn't finish his thought. He kneads his bow yet again, brow pulled tight into nervous concern.

"You just tried to  _kill yourself_! You're not going back in. Back to the boat. Give me fifteen minutes – that's it. If we're not there or if HYDRA comes first, you leave, get distance from this fucking dome, and call Stark."

James sounds like the person he becomes after a few short, long years. He wasn't supposed to, she realizes: he was supposed to end up crumpled against a wall with a bullet in his head.  _  
_

Natasha turns and looks toward the buildings. As night permeates the demolished landscape, James sprints—no calm walk, no purposeful stride—across the courtyard and tears into the northwest building. He was—is—desperately hunting for her, all the while knowing that HYDRA was—is—a paltry fifteen minutes away, if that.

For him, for her, for Sam, there would be no stolen jet and mad dash to Finnmark. No Hamningberg. No hotel room in Kiruna. No interminable train ride to Stockholm. No terrible memory of an atrocity, no longer train ride to Kazakhstan, no kindly harsh words from Sam begging James to not drown in his own ghosts. No daring jaunt to Death Valley. No rescue for Steve.

Nothing. None of it.

She's supposed to be the body in their morgue, beaten and bled out.

Steve is supposed to be another body in their morgue, shot dead.

Sam is supposed to be a body rotting on the floor under the heat of Death Valley.

The world is supposed to end on November 7, 2016.

Over time, she'd learned that people aren't guaranteed. Nothing is guaranteed. Their world, their family – not even that.

"Natasha." Clint's eyes grow wide and earnest, desperate and resolute. "We change it. Right here. All of it. Me and you. Old times."

She'd also learned: nothing that good comes without a price.

***

The plan is to jump, to use the waning power of his left leg to propel him high into the air. And then to reach out with his right hand, for it to  _work one last time_.

Plans have kind of sucked lately.

Barnes' audacious jump turns up being an uninspired hop, netting him  _maybe_ two meters.

The moment he lands on the splintered glass, he dives toward the center of the cylinders, then scrambles to the opposite side. His all-consuming goals are to get distance from the casualty radius and to somehow not fall. He can take shrapnel all fucking day, but he  _can't die_.

A high-pitched  _riiiing_  stops up his ears.

His body trembles from the outside in: skin vibrating, lungs deflating, heart stopping, blood vessels bulging.

Metal fragments from the percussion grenade and Rumlow's armor strafe against his suit. A couple tear through the bare skin on his neck, his face. Rumlow's blood and bones and parts follow.

First things last, the glass dome gives way, shards falling into the dark abyss.

It all lasts for half of a split second.

He leaps toward the inverted-funnel, sheet-metal wall, kicks off of it, twists, and grabs for the emergency lever.

Arctic cold blasts into the compartment.

His fingers wrap around it.

It turns, and the door swings inward. He slips through the opening and rolls onto a grated, metal floor.

Icy, dry air cyclones through the small space, while wind whistles through the piercing ringing in his ears. He sucks in a deep, deep breath, letting that cold, cold air remind his body of what it can do. What it has to do.

Heart pattering, Barnes slides his knees across the floor and pushes himself up.

Then, he shuts off his flashlight; there's no need for it.

The cylinder is tall and wide, easily fitting him with feet of space to spare. A bright, yellow-orange light illuminates the cylinder's entirety. That light emanates from a whirling, glowing helix machine below his feet.

Barnes hops down onto another metal grate, putting him level with the helix. Once upon a time, he could nimbly avoid touching the spinning light, but he lands on his right leg, which wobbles and throws him off-balance.

He recovers with a sloppy swing of his right arm and a quick push off the ground with the immovable tips of his left fingers.

His face flushing red, he steadies and numbly realizes: he'd swung his right arm through the churning threshold of whirling, yellow-orange light. In that split millisecond, it had only felt like a tingle of cold, minty lotion.

The skin of that arm is goosebumped and chilled but still its usual healthy color.

But.

Blood drips onto the floor from a long, deep laceration along the underside of his wrist. His radial artery is nicked. His knuckles are split and newly bruised. The injuries are identical to those from Berlin – from a year ago.

The slight curve along the outer side of his wrist—the one he'd picked up after breaking his wrist the same way twice in less than a year, once in the Cosmodrome and once in Brazil—is still there, unhealed.

The scars from July are completely gone.

The helix reverses time, damage, death: confirmed. It'd taken a year in – oh – less than a millisecond.

Super.

Barnes only sees the helix and its twirling light. He doesn't see an electrical conduit, and he doesn't see a separate control box, and he doesn't see an off switch  _anywhere_ on his side of the device.

On  _his side_.

Through the barrier of light, he clearly sees the whirling, black granite bends of the double-helix, and he sees its pedestal, full of buttons and screens.

The main controls are with Operations, exactly where Natasha and Barton are stationed. He reaches up to tap his comm, forgetting until his fingers find a bare, empty ear.

His gut twists.

If they could have—

The light pulsates, billowing towards him  _by feet_. Barnes hops away as far as he can go, back pushed flat against the rounded, gray wall.

Like the swell of ocean water on a beach, the light ripples back to the machine, then surges again only a few seconds later, coming within  _inches_  of his body.

For a few moments, Barnes thinks that Rumlow's suicide bomb damaged the machine.

Then the swell of light sucks back to the machine, spins furiously faster, and shoots down – down to the glass dome, whatever's left of it, and down toward the city, down toward thousands or millions of people – and eight billion more.

The world ends here.

In an instant, he thinks through the only way to end this. He does the quick math and comes up with improbable, terrifying odds.

Exactly the odds he's been fearing for two months.

He doesn't have the time to find another way, and all he can do is hope that the person on the other side understands what to do.

Hope is for fools.

A thought crosses his mind, at just the perfect time, and that thought coalesces into stunned realization, and then into calm comprehension.

Barnes tears open a pocket on his tac vest and pulls out a standard-issue, thick, black Sharpie marker. Uncapped, its scent reminds him of Steve, doodling endlessly. Something in his chest spasms.

On the wall behind him, in the direct sightline of the machine, he goes to hastily draw a symbol that has impossibly been a constant throughout his entire life. No matter how this goes, he knows that he'll know.

Before he draws it, he drops the marker and its cap.

Orion's already on that wall: yellow-orange dots burned into the metal, unmistakably forming Steve's constellation.

" _That one's Orion, Buck. You see it? Look, there's the shield."_

He sees it.

People are dying. He doesn't have time to wonder.

With all of his trust in the Winter Soldier and Bucky, Barnes steps into the spinning light and doesn't know who the hell –

***

"You just tried to kill yourself!" The expression on Barnes' face is the most emotion Sam has ever seen from him. Ever. It's pure intensity, concern, and conviction.

"You're not going back in. Back to the boat. Give me fifteen minutes – that's it. If we're not there or if HYDRA comes first, you leave, get distance from this fucking dome, and call Stark."

Sam steps forward, right into Barnes' space. "Not happening."

Barnes shoves his phone—pulled from somewhere—against Sam's chest. By instinct alone, Sam takes it.

"Happening. Go."

Barnes turns and sprints off, toward the entrance to the northwest building. Sam watches him, mouth open, and thinks about throwing this stupid phone at Barnes' stupid head. It'd be as useful: without Barnes' thermal imprint, it won't –

In the middle of that thought, Sam actually looks at the phone. Its screen is cracked, and the back of it is dented, but it's still operational and unlocked, ready to go.

"God damn it."

Sam stands there dumbly for too long, before thinking to set his watch to keep count of the passing seconds and minutes.

Common sense tells him to do exactly what Barnes said: get back to the boat, wait, and then call for help. A mix of courage and fear tells him to run after Barnes, help find Natasha, and kill the fuck out of every HYDRA person who steps foot on the island.

If he does that –

He'll lose himself again.

Sam spares a look at the crushed vehicle, at the blood on the shattered windshield, and then up the length of the shadowed, brick building. He'd damn near died today.

Barnes is right: he can't go back inside.

 _Find her_ , he thinks – and decides to put all of his trust in Barnes to get this done.

Sam turns on his heel, expands his wings, and launches into the cloudy, starless night sky – southeast, toward the boat.

He keeps low, all but skimming the tops of the brittle, skeletal remains of old buildings. He dodges and weaves through the maze of debris, nothing but moonlight as his guide.

_I want off this island._

_Get her and let's go._

He's a counselor, and he knows better than to have shitty, bad thoughts like those.

He's a soldier, too, and he knows better than to rely on naïve hopes to complete missions.

Sam realizes: he needs to prepare himself to leave them behind – to get Tony and Rhodes here, hopefully before it's too late.

He hears the soft lapping of the late summer, Arctic water against the pebble shore, then glimpses the sweet sight of the boat.

 _Make it here_ , Sam wills or prays or both.

Sam descends quickly; ten feet from the dark ground, he collapses his wings, sets foot on the glossy pebbles, and smells the strong, strong smell of leaking gasoline.

 _No, no, no_  – the gas tank must've gotten damaged, when they'd scraped up to the shore –

_Snickt-click._

_Plop._

What.

Sam is blown backward by an explosion he never sees coming.

Bits and pieces of the boat's hull batter against him, and it's by years of training and conditioning alone that Sam thinks to re-activate his wings, to use them as a shield, even as his body smacks backward into the mossy hill.

 _Pop-pop-pops!_ of the stockpile of ammunition ring out through the still night air, soon followed by  _bang-bang-bangs!_ of left-behind grenades.

 _Move, Wilson_.

HYDRA's here, and they've blown up the boat: nothing left to do but fly and fight.

Sam shoots up into the air, spiraling to avoid potential bullets, and pulls out his two Beretta M9s. It's then that awful realization sends heat through his body: he probably doesn't have much ammo left in either weapon.

Distracted, he nearly  _doesn't see_ a  _fucking Quinjet_  descending, already well into combat landing protocol. Sam twists around, kicks off the hull, and blasts higher –

The island's swarming with black-clad soldiers, already on the ground and running toward the cluster of brick buildings.

Four jets, not including the one he'd nearly just splattered into, have already landed. The only good thing is that they're likely empty, what with all their soldiers converging on those buildings.

_Son of a bitch._

Back near the burning remains of the boat, Sam glimpses a lone, dark figure dart up the hill and sprint toward the piles of debris.

In an instant, Sam creates a plan: neutralize that soldier, steal his weapons, find Barnes and Natasha, take one of those empty jets, and get the hell out.

Easy, right?

Before he loses that lone soldier somewhere in the debris, Sam blasts down toward the ground, doubles back, and surges around the first pile of junk.

An honest-to-God  _arrow_ whizzes by his head.

 _What the –_ Fuck HYDRA.

Both weapons aimed and ready, Sam sets down, folds his wings back, and fearlessly sprints forward. There isn't time for fear: until Barnes and Natasha get out of that building, this is on him.

Not too far ahead, Sam hears the tell-tale sound of a person running: fast footfalls, jagged breaths, gear  _clacking_.

Another arrow grazes Sam's left arm.

Sam shoots – he can't see the person, but he can track the trajectory of that arrow. He's pretty sure he misses, even as he runs into an unexpected pile of rubble, trips forward over it, and eases into a roll that puts him back onto his feet.

No one saw that. It's dark, hard to see. He's cool.

He keeps running, weapons still aimed and ready, but he doesn't hear anyone, not anymore.

His arms break out into goosebumps. A chill literally runs up his neck. Adrenaline lights a gasoline trail up his legs.

Sam rockets straight up and flips around, putting his back toward the brick buildings and his sidearms toward those piles of rubble. He keeps flying backward: ready to kill, but knowing when to retreat.

In the corner of his eye, he sees his lone soldier slink through one of the skeletal, dilapidated buildings, dart out the other side, and make a run toward the open, unguarded path toward the intact cluster of brick buildings.

Sam engages: flying low, following the soldier's path, preparing to –

The skeletal building explodes, its hot, heavy blast knocking into Sam so hard it steals his breath, so unexpectedly that he's suddenly eating old, musty dirt that smells like an old cellar.

His ears ring and ring.

The world spins and spins.

The air is bitterly cold. Every breath is ice in his lungs.

His fingers are numb.

His eyes are heavy.

His muscles throb, drained to exhaustion.

His head hurts.

Concrete and bits of rock rain against his back, because it's been that kind of a fucking day.

Sam drags his hands through the hard dirt, pushes himself up to his knees, and forces his body to forget: the cold, the numb, the exhaustion, the aches, the injuries.  _Keep going_.

Sam's wings still work, and he soars with them, pursuing that one lone soldier out of dozens, because – seriously,  _fuck this guy_.

A couple more arrows lob past his head, but Sam doesn't care.

No. He's done playing that game.

Near the cluster of buildings, Sam suddenly comes down hard, dropping himself out of the sky and kicking the fuck out of the guy as he does it.

Both of them go down, hard.

"What the – I fucking hate this place."

Sam ignores that and scrambles to his feet, equally as quick as the man, both of their weapons capably aimed at each other.

Sam's back is to the buildings. He can't see any of the enemies, can't see what HYDRA is doing, and he should be  _shooting this guy_.

An instinct tells him  _no._

It's dark enough that Sam can't see more than the shine of the man's eyes, the outline of that man's face, and the sweat glistening on that man's bare arms. It's odd, Sam sort of thinks, that this one isn't covered in head-to-toe black, doesn't have a helmet, uses arrows – but what else could this person be on HYDRA's inhuman island.

The man tilts his head, eyes narrowing a fraction, enough to warn Sam a split second before it happens.

The man drops back-flat to the ground, bow aimed in the blink of an eye, arrow locked, loaded, and fired.

As Sam blasts backward, weapons still aimed, that arrow hits his wing – and –

Doesn't explode.

Doesn't do anything, except bounce and fall to the ground.

As Sam recovers, he sees the man flip to his feet, load another arrow, and take aim.

Instincts be damned, Sam shoots and shoots and shoots, until the man drops to the ground, chest heaving desperate breaths, blood darkening the old, crusty dirt.

The arrow soars past Sam's head, free and clear.

One down, dozens to go, with no sign of Barnes or –

_BOOM!_

The ground shakes and rumbles. Even at this distance, a couple shards of brick make it to Sam, cutting his arms and face.

Sam spins around and sees: that explosive arrow has made a giant, flaming hole in the northwest building.

More than that….

Sam squints and definitely sees soldiers inside that hole, definitely sees a blur of red hair.

"No way," Sam mutters to himself, then gets himself the fuck inside that building.

Impossibly, he sees Barnes first: bloody, pale, blank, and doing nothing, as dozens of HYDRA soldiers surround him and Natasha.

Natasha fights, efficient, ruthless, and lethal, but her face and eyes just as blank and gone as Barnes.

Yeah. Sam knows the feeling.

First things first: Sam grabs Barnes, spins him toward the opening, and kicks his ass straight through it.

Second things second: Sam pounces forward, slides to the ground, grabs Natasha by the waist, and then reverses course. Together, they fly out through the opening, but not before Sam takes a grenade from his tactical vest and tosses HYDRA a little present.

 _Boom_.

Sam doesn't notice the broken, gold arrow necklace that falls out of his pocket and settles near the jagged, charred opening.

***

Rhodes sees the missile hit Tony. Sees Tony's suit go dark. Sees the chest plating splinter open, liquid fire surging up Tony's armored body. Sees Tony's limp, pinwheeling body plummet through the dark sky.

"Tony!" Rhodes shouts, even as he darts between storage containers and sentry posts, explosions pattering shrapnel and shards against his suit. "Tony!"

Tony doesn't answer.

_God damn it._

"Rhodes – reports are coming in from Moscow, all over the news. It's bad down there."

They can't afford this. Not right now.

Half of the helicarrier's engines are destroyed. The other two are fully functional. Whether or not HYDRA can reposition, Rhodes doesn't know that it matters.

Meanwhile: the rapidly expanding swath of yellow-orange light that swirls down from the helicarrier's belly has reached all the way to the ground, to the city below – and it's the same as the one Rhodes watched on TV three weeks ago.

He won't let Tony die.

"JARVIS, vitals?"

Rhodes clears the edge of the helicarrier and maneuvers into a steep dive, his HUD's tracking system zeroing in Tony's plummeting body. In the corner of that HUD, Tony's vitals appear: respiration, 0; pulse, 0; blood pressure, 0.

Rhodes' heart skips; gut, bottoms out.

"Chances?"

Even JARVIS hesitates. "There is no chance. Blast damage to the chest cavity is extensive and fatal."

 _Tony_.

That swath of yellow-orange light becomes wider and wider with every meter dropped, and Rhodes skims close, too close, as he closes in on Tony.

Tony, who's dead, without a chance – while the world below ends.

Decision made before he realizes he's made that decision, Rhodes lets up. He comes to a dead stop mid-air – and watches Tony's body tumble, tumble, tumble gone.

No chance.

"Rhodey—" Bruce's shaken voice fills his ears. "I'm sorry."

There isn't time now to grieve.

Rhodes spins around and looks up at the helicarrier: plumes of black smoke bleeding from the two engines, the funnel of whirling yellow-orange light radiating from the underbelly.

There won't be time later, is the thing.

"How do we shut this down?" Rhodes demands, glad to hear his own voice is unemotional, tough, Air Force strong: everything it's supposed to be.

"Take the Command Deck," Bruce answers. "It's the only way. But we have no idea what happened to Natasha or Clint."

Ignoring the last part of that, Rhodes surges up and blasts to the helicarrier's blacktop, willing himself to get there before HYDRA decides to jump to the other world.

He does.

And they don't.

Automatically, JARVIS scans the blacktop for threats but only finds Steve: crawling, clawing, and stumbling his way across the deck, toward what can only be the access door to the interior of the helicarrier.

They're going to the same place.

Rhodes darts between artillery and missiles, flying low and parallel to the deck – and maybe, just maybe, HYDRA will be dumb enough to blow themselves apart.

Within seconds, he touches down and runs the rest of the way to Steve, sliding across the blacktop and taking cover behind a shipping container. HYDRA's actually  _not_ dumb enough to blow themselves apart, and they won't fire on him here.

He thinks.

Steve barely pays him mind – not as his blood drips, as his lungs heave in desperate breaths, as his hands shake, as he tries to be Captain America one last time.

"Steve."

Steve continues to crawl forward, dragging a gushing-blood leg behind him, while his tattered, dislocated right arm  _barely_ works.

Rhodes folds his helmet back and takes one of Steve's least-damaged arms. "Tony's dead. It's us."

Those two statements must be like ice water jarring Steve out of his single-minded fugue. Steve drops back to his knees, sweat-drenched eyebrows pulled together, face pale and bruised and raw, and finally,  _finally_ meets Rhodes' eyes.

"Everyone else?" Steve rasps, a bead of hope in his tone.

Rhodes shakes his head: no. No one else. "It's us."

Tony. Natasha. Barton. Barnes. All of them are gone.

Their world is gone.

A puddle of Steve's blood expands against the black asphalt, reaching Rhodes' metal knees.

Steve's gone: he just hasn't accepted it yet.

Rhodes wastes time explaining, "HYDRA was ready for us. The machine's on; it's killing people. Cap – I have to turn it off."

Resolute, Steve answers, "We do. We go."

That's that.

Rhodes' helmet melts back in place, and he reaches out to take Steve's hand, then supports his weight as they quickly descend down to Seven.

Rhodes kills as they go – anyone he sees.

Steve bleeds and bleeds.

The outer Command Deck is riddled with bodies: some with broken necks, others with arrows sticking out of their bodies. Natasha and Barton had made it this far.

Rhodes pushes forward, bracing himself to meet whatever had taken out two of their most skilled agents.

Voice weak and crusty, Steve asks, "You're sure? About them?"

"We're—"

 _Sure_ dies on Rhodes' tongue.

A ring of swirling blue light protects the inner Command Deck: the controls, the computers, the nerve system of the helicarrier.

In a single instant, Rhodes knows what happened to Natasha and Barton.

In that single instant, Rhodes knows: they've been outplayed.

It's over.

***

– on the floor.

The only sound is a strange white rushing noise, like a shell from Manhattan Beach held to his ear.

Bucky drags his bruised left hand across the gray, concrete floor, noting that it's pitted, cracked, and frigidly cold. His hollow breaths come as white billows of air, while the bare skin of his arms is goosebumped and tinged blue.

He stands up and turns in a full circle, nothing familiar about the environment. It doesn't look like Zola's lab, but it looks like Hydra. It feels like Hydra – another fucking experiment.

A thick yellow-orange wave of light spins in a circle so damned fast that he's dizzy, vibrations rippling into his body. Through the spinning light, he sees a small room beyond: cylindrical, shiny, no door in sight. On the far wall, the constellation Orion  _glows_ on the wall.

 _There's the shield, Buck_. _You see it?_

In the sky, dimmed by Manhattan's ever-brightening lights.

On brick walls throughout Brooklyn, scrawled in painted graffiti.

The brand of Sarah's piano.

The fucking incredible Soviet Orion C4 Poustka motorbike Johnny Han somehow fucking got his fucking hands on in 1940.

On his locker at Goldie's Gym, a gray sticker put there by probably Steve.

During basic, an ugly fucking tattoo on the bicep of Private James Morgan.

In Italy, the cursive word scrawled over all the medkits.

At Krausberg, in the guard's room, the gray wall where the gray paint flaked in the perfect pattern –  _there's the shield, there's the shield, there's the shield_.

"I see it."

In the silence, his own words deafeningly pierce his ears. He flinches, hands cupped over them, and turns, hunched over, trying to escape their pounding echo. But the echo only grows louder: roaring, bouncing circles, around and around, louder and louder, piercing knives into his eardrums.

Bucky sinks to his knees and wraps his arms around his head, trying and failing to block the booming noise.

 _Turn it off_.

It's his own voice, inside his own head, loud and persistent.  _Get up and turn it off_.

 _Get up and turn it off_.

Bucky pushes himself to his feet, keeping his hands uselessly pressed flat over his ears. Pressure builds behind his forehead, spikes of pain shooting up the back of his head. Liquid dribbles down his jaw; it smells like blood.

 _Turn it off_.

He looks at the two helix-like curves spinning in unison. They're sitting on a black foundation, full of buttons and something that looks like a Philco screen – but flatter, clearer, bigger. Next to it, he notices black knobs, more colorful buttons, and gauges. He knows that it all must control the machine, but he has no idea  _how._

Red droplets drip onto the foundation. Still clutched over his ears, his fingers are slick and sticky.

He's gotta turn it off, no question. He's gotta make it home. He's going to make it home. For Steve.

Above the controls, near the spinning helices, he notices a small, round, grooved black handle.

_Turn it._

Bucky reaches out with his left hand, blood between his fingers and caked under his nails. His hand shakes, but he wraps it around the handle and twists left.

Even though it barely budges, the console goes nuts with red lights and shrieking alarms – shrieking alarms that join his stretched, echoing voice, spinning in wide, booming circles, louder and louder.

Quickly, he wraps his right hand around the handle and throws the weight of his body against the console. The metal is ice cold and painful against his hands, and the force it takes to nudge the handle strains his aching, bruised wrists.

The handle gives - turning, and turning, and turning. He twists it until it won't twist anymore, and it becomes loose in its housing.

_Pull it out._

He doesn't hesitate: he pulls it straight out, seeing only a glimpse of a blinding, incinerating yellow-orange glow.

***

Warm, sticky blood rushes over Natasha's hand. A body drops.

A soldier comes up behind her and doesn't seem to expect how she drops to the ground, undercuts his legs, grabs his head, breaks his neck, and tosses his body over hers.

She shoots another, then another, dropping an expended, stolen sidearm before stealing an AR-15 rifle from a dead body.

The path to the Quinjet is nearly clear.

In the distance, Sam drops out of the sky, rushing toward the barren ground. She can only hope it's what is  _supposed_ to happen.

Sam never mentioned the bodies. Never questioned the dead.

It's pitch dark – and, maybe, in the adrenaline-tipped heat of these minutes, he never even  _noticed_ the dead.

She'd never questioned it, until this day.

Natasha punches a soldier in the face, then back-kicks that soldier's jugular in half. Dead.

Sam soars backward, shooting and shooting and shooting –

Natasha flinches, jaw clenching, heart stopping.  _Clint_.

Moments later, fire and smoke erupts from a precise spot on the side of the northwest building. Sam hesitates for only a moment, before soaring inside.

Seconds later, James flails to the ground, as helpless now and she remembers him then.

That's her cue.

Natasha runs away from the jet, leaving the rest of the soldiers for Sam, and gets distance from them: from Sam, from herself, from James.

She gives them a wide berth, even as she circles back around toward the brick buildings. She knows that Romanoff and Barnes won't see her; she doubts Sam will, not right now.

Far enough out, she ducks behind a pile of concrete debris and watches them, only to make sure they make it to the jet and off the island.

Sam pushes James from behind, forcing him to walk, able to lead him anywhere. Natasha watches herself follow them, vulnerably tucked into herself, shut down and reeling from what that building had made her see.

James twists away from Sam and trips over a body, falling to his hands and knees. He doesn't get back up – only stares at the northwest building, memories drowning him.

Sam shoots three soldiers dead, then tosses his expended M9 and starts to yank at James, trying and failing to pull him up. Sam desperately yells at him.

Natasha turns her attention to the southeast shore and sees the outlines of two Pave Hawks and at least three Quinjets. They're still out over the sea, but, soon enough, they'll be here – and it'll be over.

Sam pulls and pulls at James.

And Natasha remembers.

Rifle brought to bear, Natasha shoots near them: puffs of snow and wisps of dirt pop-pop-popping into the air.

It's enough that Sam finally uses his wings to get James up and them both in the air, leaving Romanoff to –

Natasha ducks, wipes thick snowflakes from her nose, and ignores a messy spray of bullets. They hadn't meant to kill anyone: just spook HYDRA's newest crop of cannon fodder.

She watches them find safety in the jet.

Sees the cargo ramp close.

Hears the roar of the engines.

And breathes.

The jet's warning lights flash red, red, red, dimming quickly into the far distance.

 _Clint_.

Exhausted, eyes heavy, skin tingly-numb, Natasha takes her rifle and runs, fully aware that those two helicopters and handful of jets are inbound.

They'll steal one and get the hell out of here. Easy.

After that, she doesn't know.

A few hundred meters out, Natasha spots a dark figure laying supine and motionless on the ground.

She knows before she gets to him, before she slides across the hard dirt and accumulating snow, before she sinks her hands into his bullet-shredded chest.

It's not him, but it is. It's Clint.

She closes his eyes – and stays. Stupidly stays.

 _Whap-whap-whap_. Those helicopters are closer.

Two of the jets have cut west, chasing after Sam, James, and herself.

The other jet's engines  _roar_ closer and closer and closer.

Natasha looks up and sees three aircraft cresting the hill, seconds away.

Near the buildings, voices shout orders in clear Russian. There are still dozens of soldiers here, with dozens more entering landing protocol.

She doesn't know what she's –

The incoming helicopters and jet freeze mid-descent – then dissolve into puffs of yellow-orange dust, lighting up the night sky for a split second as they vanish.

In the near distance, each and every one of the shadowed, dead bodies disintegrate, leaving nothing in their wake but sad, barren dirt.

Voices shouting in Russian go silent, another needle scratching at the end of another record on another turntable.

Under her hands, Clint's body goes, too. Natasha drops four inches, palms hitting flat against the old, gritty earth. Her fingers dig and curl into the soil, and she waits for her turn.

They've failed. Or the future has failed. Or something – something has gone wrong, another trap door opening under their feet.

"I hate this place."

That voice – It belongs to a shattered person on a Quinjet headed for Finnmark.

Natasha pushes herself to gummy legs, while her lungs decide to suck in every bit of spare oxygen near her, while her lips turn dry, while she turns to face that voice.

Behind James, the four brick buildings crumble, sheaves of yellow-orange sparks cascading to the ground. The rocket moorings, the radio towers, the lookout, the debris: all of it, gone, the same way.

The brilliant colors fade back into inky night.

Afraid, confused, Natasha steps away from him.

"World's safe," James says.

 _How_ dies inside her throat, even as a cold, minty sensation overtakes her.

That step backward interrupts with her back thumping into an oak wall, speckled black granite under her feet, and too-bright fluorescent lights  _buzzing_ above her head. A two-story Christmas tree with sprinkle-colored lights looms to her left, telling her: she's home.

It's the open foyer back at base.

In front of her, a wall of nine flat-screen TVs flick to the same news channel, all the coverage flipping from an unconfirmed catastrophe in Moscow to a miracle in Seattle: millions dead for three weeks are suddenly millions returned to life, as if that day in December had never ended.

Natasha's ear piece crackles with Sam's impossible voice. "Uh – Flight, Quinjet Nine. We're locked out from flight controls – and where the hell'd Quinjet Six go?"

She suddenly can't catch her breath, and, suddenly, her body trembles from the inside out. Hand unconsciously going to her stomach, Natasha slides down the smooth, oak wall, eyes locked on those screens.

How.

"Was I—"

"Yes, Tony. You were dead."

Dazed, jaw loose, Natasha turns her head to find Tony and Rhodes standing near the tree, both without their armor: dirty, sweaty, bloody, but alive and safe.

Rhodes eclipses Tony in a relieved, worried hug.

"Holy shit," Tony whispers – nothing cool, nothing glib, nothing together. His wide eyes find her. "They were ready for us."

All she can do is nod her head, even when Rhodes lets Tony go, and even when Tony dully walks her way and folds down next to her, a hand cupped over his face.

"Is that—" Tony trails off, as he scours and absorbs the "BREAKING NEWS" headline: MILLIONS KILLED IN SEATTLE MYSTERIOUSLY ALIVE; SIMILAR MOSCOW EVENT UNCONFIRMED; AWAITING STATEMENT FROM OFFICIALS.

"Seattle's back," Natasha says, ignoring how her voice breaks. "Sam's back."

Rhodes settles next to them, nothing odd today about an Air Force colonel taking up space on the floor.

"Hey – what the hell's going on?"

Together, all three of them look up to the third floor mezzanine, where Maria stands – dark hair in a tight bun, ever-present ear piece poised, arms crossed. Maria cocks an eyebrow, waiting for one of them to somehow explain –  _this_.

Tony realizes aloud, "We won."

Natasha looks to the screens that confirm an undeniable victory.

Somehow, it hardly feels like one.

***

Kozerska.

The subterranean base outside Kraków.

Lake Kręta.

Tabernas.

The Scablands of Washington.

Verlauben.

Death Valley.

The Cosmodrome.

Dozens and dozens of bases like them. Each is replaced by sprawling, hundred-year-old oak trees, their leaves perpetually burnt-autumn orange, and their roots cemented in a radius of brilliant, bright green grass.

Back at home, Doctor Alicia Eicher throws a fist at thin air. She takes a long step forward to catch herself from falling, but her momentum is too much, and she stumbles into a pair of waiting hands. Those hands steady and right her, and she looks up, confused and panicked.

She finds two impossible things: SHIELD headquarters instead of a Berlin hospital, and James Barnes instead of her would-be murderer. He is perfectly healthy and perfectly…different. "Get to the morgue." Before she can ask, protest, or think, he repeats: "The morgue. It's important."

The body in drawer 2-H lays blue, frozen, and over a year dead. For him, two years and four months earlier, the mission to the Cosmodrome had gone a different way. In an instant, the body becomes a warm, gasping, living person. Blood seeps from another set of three bullet holes to the chest.

Minutes later, Sharon walks, then runs on two old legs, after the flurry of medical personnel pushing a gurney that transports an impossible person with impossible injuries. The person trailing behind it is equally as impossible.

Seven civilians killed in Berlin in January 2017 return to their lives – a year behind, but alive.

Seven SHIELD agents, last seen brutally murdered by HYDRA in July 2018, appear in the Cafeteria, alive and well. More than a dozen others, killed during the base attack in July, join them.

Nine formerly dead SHIELD guards and flight deck crew, their last memories being Captain America asking for support against  _HYDRA_ ,  _what the fuck?_ , materialize in the crowded cafeteria of SHIELD's headquarters.

In Washington, DC, two police officers and three civilians were never killed on a highway bridge.

Renata knocked.

For these new days, there aren't enough hours in the 24/7 news cycle.

There are hundreds more lives that deserve to be saved and hundreds more deaths that deserve to be reversed, but even this is…

It's what's right for this world.

It's almost all that he can do for it.

***

A deep blue sky rolls with puffs of white clouds. Vibrant, red summer tulips bend with a crisp breeze. Yellow-orange leaves crunch under Steve's last, hesitant step.

More of those leaves scatter across a gray, twisting cobblestone path, catching in the black metal fence at the path's edge. Tall, sprawling trees of bushy, orange and yellow leaves roll and  _crinkle_  with the breeze. Steve knows this place: Shakespeare Garden in Central Park.

"I always liked the tulips, but I fucking  _hated_  the summer. Remember those summers, Steve?"

From out of nowhere, Bucky's left shoulder brushes against Steve's. It feels soft and warm, like flesh and muscle, and that's about as right as the rest of this.

Steve nods, slow and distracted, but, really, scared to look at Bucky. "Yeah. Pizza pie ovens. Buck, what is this?"

"You know," Bucky responds, gently firm. "Walk with me?"

Steve's throat locks, his tongue damn near glued to the roof his mouth. A wave of dizziness jolts this strange, beautiful world, and he recognizes it as  _panic_. Bucky's hand squeezes Steve's somehow-healed arm, and all it takes for Steve's numb legs to move is Bucky's "c'mon."

The park is just as Steve remembers it from 1939: long shadows crisscrossing the cobblestone, red and blue flowers and deep green grasses filling the spaces between fences, black iron luminaires, and a false sky of yellow-orange leaves where the branches overlap.

Steve finally glances at Bucky and sees  _happiness_. Hands stuffed into the pockets of his pants, shoulders relaxed, his short hair shifting with the breeze, and the smallest, most genuine hint of a smile on his face. It's how Steve thinks of him – the best, the only.

"Is this real?" Steve asks, an unintended whisper. Because he knows this, too.

Bucky nods. "World's safe." A long pause and the crunch of autumn leaves dissolving next to the summertime flowers. "I think…my entire life was leading up to that one moment."

Steve can't find words. His chest, of all things, trembles from the inside out. More than anything, he doesn't want to be here. His eyes sting and sting and sting, as good as a wasp pricking its stinger into his eyes, over and over and over again.

"I fixed what I could. What was right to fix."

Before the path curves around to a set of stone steps, Steve stops walking. He doesn't understand  _any_  of this. "What…  _How_?"

A few steps ahead, Bucky turns around, pulls his left hand out of his pocket, and holds a glowing, yellow-orange stone for Steve to take. For a split second, Bucky's eyes burn with the color – the color of the autumn leaves – and for that split second, Steve doesn't recognize him.

"Take it. It won't hurt you; I'll make sure. Give it to Thor; he's on his way. He'll know what to do."

Eyes closed, Steve breathes the way Bucky'd taught him: to the count of three, then a color, then to another count of three, and then to another color. The only color he can see is yellow-orange.

This is a fucking joke. A god damn fucking joke.

"Steve, take it."

Steve stalks forward before he opens his eyes to see where he's going, brushing past Bucky and his fucking orange rock. He reaches the steps and takes them two at a time, not trying to get away from Bucky as much as burn away adrenaline, dread, and panic.

He hears Bucky jog up behind him and resists conflicting urges to run away and to turn around and hug him. He settles for walking a new path, toward the concrete fountain in the distance.

Shoulder to shoulder again, Bucky says, "You're mad."

A laugh bubbles up from somewhere horrible and drags awful words behind it. "You're dead."

"About that. The other me is alive now. Things went different for him. He never had the chance I did. Give'em a second one. Third? Whatever."

What Bucky says absorbs about as well as fresh bird shit splattered onto a dirty window. Off to their left, there's a glossy, wooden bench. Quickly, Steve makes his way to it, his legs and his serum worthless here. He props his elbows on his knees, hunched over, and rubs the everliving fuck out of his eyes.

Bucky sits beside him. "I'm trying to make this easier."

"Do better," Steve bites.

"I'm trying to expl—"

Those three and a half words are enough to light Steve's half-inch fuse. He rears up, leans into Bucky's face, and roars, "What about  _you_?!"

The wasps sting his eyes. A whole fucking nest of them. The first drops of tears hit his cheeks.

"I did something that makes the world better. It's been a long time since I could say that." Bucky is calm, patient, but, mostly, inscrutable. "I'm good with this."

Steve thinks of another time, another horrible time when Bucky said the same thing. He'd meant it then, proving it with every word and every action since.

"What happens to you?"

Bucky shrugs and shakes his head. "I don't know," he says, smiling. "It feels like…infinite peace. And it's okay to have that."

The wasps in Steve's eyes drown. "How long can I stay here with you?"

"As long as you need. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

In the wind, the yellow-orange leaves rustle and scatter. The flowers bend. The clouds roll on by.

Time holds still, for just a little longer.

***

The Avengers will return in  _Chapter 18: Winter's Day_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: "The Revolution Has Begun" by Mark Mothersbaugh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsYwyYh34E) & "Days Get Heavy (Unplugged)" by Fort Frances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az7g2OxRhro)
> 
> Chapter title from _ER_.
> 
> Edited to add: The time infinity stone color is Marvel comic-based and doesn't follow MCU canon. The Tesseract portal color does follow MCU canon (Avengers 1). Liberties taken. :) (Thank you, Mireborn!) 
> 
> So, there it is. The next chapter is epilogue-y. Thank you for reading!


	18. Winter's Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam doesn’t comment on it, but Steve does. “HYDRA’s gone.”
> 
> They slide their trays onto an empty table near the windows. Outside, fluffy flakes of wet snow trickle through the air. The dormant jet pads collect a sheen of smooth, settled white. For the first time that Sam can remember, the nonstop motion of the base is hushed.
> 
> The world is safe, for now. Even SHIELD can savor this day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I was pretty far into writing this story when MCU changed the time stone color to green from the comic yellowish orange. I decided to not change the color from the comics to MCU, as I had already significantly built that color into the story. Therefore, the time stone follows comic book canon. 
> 
> Warnings: Disability reversal (depending on how you look at it)

Natasha plugs in a scent diffuser; after it begins to hiss a scent, she finds out it's loaded with lavender essential oil. It'll work.

She glances at the barely living body in the hospital bed, then flicks her eyes to the vitals monitor. Fresh out of surgery, those numbers aren't great, but Barnes is alive, breathing, and here.

"Couldn't make it easy for us, could you."

It's less than fair.

So's this.

"JARVIS…" she says, before realizing she's not sure what to ask him to do. "Play whatever."

She forgets what James knew back in 2016, what he'd liked. Two years had been a very long time.

JARVIS chooses an audio book. Really, it won't matter what it is, so long as it's  _something_. The book, the scent, the unbleached blue blanket: all of it to signal him that he's safe, instead of with HYDRA.

This time, at least, his handshaven't been uselessly restrained. But she'd let the medical team slide a breathing tube down his throat, crack open his chest, stick a nasogastric tube up his nose, insert drains in his chest, pierce IV needles all over  _both_ of his arms, put an arterial line in his wrist, and cut a central line below his collar bone.

She figures – if James didn't want all that, he wouldn't have left himself in this condition. He would've made it easy.

She tells herself that none of this is the fault of the person in front of her. She shouldn't blame him.

 _Click_.

Natasha turns her head toward the door, expecting Cho or even Eicher, maybe a nurse. Instead, Sharon slips inside and closes the door behind her.

"How's the leg?" Natasha wonders, knowing full well what Sharon will say.

"Original recipe. Talk about a get-out-of-physical-therapy free card."

Natasha's sure.

Sharon's equally as sure, when she observes, "You don't seem happy."

Conveniently, Natasha's phone buzzes with a message. She gives it her attention and finds a message from Clint:  _"I'm fine. Why?"_ He's even attached a candid photo of the family. How quaint.

Maybe she blames him, too.

" _Just checking. You ever watch the news?"_ she replies, then pockets her phone.

Arms and ankles crossed, Sharon leans against the wall and patiently waits, eyes appraising.

Natasha lifts a shoulder in a quasi-shrug. "It's been a long day," she hedges.

It's true. She hasn't slept, since – she can't remember. For the rest of them, the helicarrier mission had been an hour or so, not including travel. For her, it'd been nearly ten, plus the hours and hours that have passed since they'd "come home." She should be passed out and blissfully asleep in her bed.

She can't sleep. She sees Clint's open, staring eyes. Thinks about the global mess Rhodes is trying to handle. Thinks about Sam calling his mom. Thinks about the person lying in the bed in front of her. Thinks about a lot of things.

Sharon hardly buys it. "At least he'll know you."

In a way.

Natasha hides behind: "Try not to be too mean to him this time."

Sharon looks annoyed for half a second, before smiling – reminiscing, maybe. "He told me once that Steve getting him worse—like that—" Sharon jerks her head toward Barnes, apparently meaning "shot to death"— "made it easier for him to be around Steve."

It's meant to be helpful, but that's the part they don't know – the part James hadn't told Steve. Death Valley for them isn't the Death Valley that had happened to Barnes, and no one knows exactly how this one had ended up with three bullets to the chest.

More importantly: no one knows  _when_ this one had ended up with three bullets to the chest. The months between September 2016, when the Cosmodrome mission had gone to hell, and October 2017, when he'd killed himself inside the Tabernas base, is a lot of time to play.

No signs of torture, at least. Natasha hopes that means something merciful.

"It means he stays," Sharon clarifies. "We'll get there."

Naïve. Optimistic. Natasha's not ready to be on that page.

Thankfully, her smartwatch chirps with a reminder: briefing in 15 minutes, Sam and Sharon not required to attend.

Technically, Sharon's supposed to be with Sam, not here. Sam's a big boy and will probably find his way to this room, too.

"Stay with him?" Natasha asks.

Sharon nods:  _of course_.

***

The lights are set to max brightness. The Christmas wrapping paper that used to cover the full-body mirror lies balled up on the floor. His shield, left behind on a missing helicarrier, sits ready by the bright window.

Arms at his side, stripped down to his briefs, Steve looks at himself for the first time in… Well, a long time.

Only one of the scars is gone completely: the grotesque, upraised HYDRA symbol burned into his chest. There's not a trace of it. All of the other scars have faded from ferocious reds into strips of light pearl, barely noticeable and barely what they had been before. All but gone but barely forgotten.

The nerve damage in his right elbow  _is_ entirely gone, and it no longer aches to put weight on his left knee. If Eicher –  _Eicher_  – does another nerve function test of his elbow, he knows it will say "unremarkable," and, if she does another CT scan of his knee, he knows the report will no longer recommend a partial replacement.

Two years and four months ago, he last experienced Death Valley. That time is an ice-cold whisper of memories, and this is the first time since then that he's felt free of it.

_Time._

Steve won't pretend to know how it works. Doesn't need to. Instead, he owes a dead man more than a "thank you" could ever say.

Steve gets dressed—that dead man isn't here to complain about Steve stealing his jackets—and heads down to Ops.

In the hallway outside the conference room, Natasha leans against the wall, one foot pressed flat against it. She lifts her chin in greeting.

Somewhat aware of how much is being asked of her, Steve can't help himself. "How is he?"

"Thor? Perpetually hungry and getting food. The cafeteria started hot service early for him." She smirks, letting that play for a split second. "Barnes is out of surgery. He'll be down for a while. Sharon's with him."

Steve regards her silently, a jumble of thoughts getting tangled up in his throat. A lot is being asked,  _but._

Natasha pushes off the wall. "Relax, Rogers. 'James' didn't come for a long time after this. We don't want to spook him this soon, do we?"

Funny: he doesn't believe her at all.

She pushes open the conference room door. "Shall we?"

***

Natasha watches Maria's eyes drag over her tablet, as her fingers swipe from screen to screen.

After an extended period of time filled with pen tapping, yawning, questioning glances, and the irritating sounds of overly aggressive slurping and spoon scraping, Maria places her tablet on the table, pinches the bridge of her nose, and then pins Thor with a stare.

"How did this happen?"

Thor freezes, an overloaded spoon of gravy-dipped mashed potatoes halfway to his mouth. "Me? I don't know; I just got here. I like your new building, by the way. The speckles in the floor remind me of Cranowa Canyon in one of the other realms—"

Natasha tunes him out, briefly wondering if he rambles on purpose to avoid responsibility. She lets her thoughts drift to anywhere but this conference room and to anything but this worthless meeting.

James is dead, the world is fixed, and whatever HYDRA has ever been is absolutely, completely destroyed. Exactly what James said he wanted. What's left to talk about?

She tunes back in, just in time to hear Steve throw Thor under a quickly moving, very heavy bus. Figuratively, of course. "Bucky said you would know what to do with it."

Thor nods enthusiastically. "I do. It shall go in the Vault, where all valuable artifacts are stored on Asgard for safekeeping."

"Let me get this straight," Tony starts in. "You're going to stash it in your dad's basement."

Thor frowns, head cocked, shoulder raised. "Essentially. But it's a very protected basement."

"Sprayed for pests? Checked for mold?" Tony presses, unaware that the collective eyerolling in the room could cause an avalanche. "Waterproofed?"

The real question is how Sam, Sharon, and Rhodes got out of this.

"Heavens, yes. There is never any water in the Vault! That would be the worst," Thor laughs, looking around the room, expecting others to join him in laughter. They don't, and his smile fades into sour discouragement.

Tony leans extremely back in his chair and tosses a tablet pen behind him. Done.

"I'm so glad the carrier pigeon made it to you," Bruce says. (Steve catches Natasha's eye and mouths "carrier pigeon?" She shakes her head: not now, not ever.) "Can we be done now?"

Maria is about as done as Tony, only she's in no mood for the too-cute back-and-forth. Maybe she wishes she was back in that coma. " _What_ is it?"

Thor slides his empty bowl across the table. "One of several very powerful, dangerous ancient stones – infinity stones. This one alters time." Thoughtful, Thor studies the yellow-ish orange stone, secure and deceivingly innocuous in its transparent container. "But it has been...altered. I thought it impossible."

"HYDRA was experimenting with a piece of the Tesseract," Bruce supplies, his interest piqued by the sudden shift in conversation. "Do you think they somehow put the two together? Or—or—I don't know, somehow imbued properties from the Tesseract into the stone? Would that explain some of this?"

Thor doesn't take his eyes off the stone, while a frown carves a shallow frame around his mouth. "I thought that impossible, as well."

"Can we study it?" Bruce pushes. "I mean, look what it did. Imagine what it could do."

_Three, two, one..._

"What  _he_  did," Steve contends, all steel and ice cold fire, like the good ol' days. "The rock didn't do it."

"Okay, yeah, fine," Bruce agrees, albeit loudly. Natasha doesn't think he's angry; no green tinge, at least. "So, is he  _in it?_  You all keep saying he's dead – but he did all of that. And we have no idea how. And – we can't even get back to the other world. We've tried. We  _need_ to study how—"

Thor stands up, taking the stone and its tiny container into his large hands. "It comes with me, to the—"

"Base—"

"It's not a basement!"

"—ment. The basement." Tony's lips quiver with a held-back smirk.

"Count yourselves fortunate that one of ours discovered the magnitude of the infinity stone's power first," Thor says, every syllable measured, clear, and composed. "And pray it's the last you see of it."

 _One of ours_.

"For the record – and I mean this, I'm serious," Tony says, still leaning to his chair's breaking point. "Do we pray to  _you_  about that? Or someone else? Honest question."

Even for Tony, it's a little much.

"Okay. We're done," Maria announces, her fingers back up to the bridge of her nose. "Captain, you stay."

Steve stays in his seat, while Bruce chases Thor out the door, still trying to convince him to "just come up to the lab for ten minutes – okay, no, that's a lie, but I'll feed you."

Natasha takes the long way around the conference table, only so she can squeeze Steve's shoulder and move right along, following Tony out the door.

"You're laying it on a little thick today," she remarks to Tony.

"Oh? Hadn't noticed. How's your undead boyfriend?"

It's been less than one day, and she's already sick of being asked that question. "Go up and find out."

Meanwhile, she'll be boxing up James' stray stuff from her apartment and sanitizing his life out of his old place. It's worth it, she tries to tell herself. Everything was worth it.

Tony follows her into the stairwell. "I might."

An eyebrow raised, Natasha glances at him to gauge his headspace: he's perfectly serious. "If Steve has it right, he's going to wake up and be terrified of you again. Try to remember that."

Some part of that must have resonated: Tony stops mid-step. Natasha waits for him on the landing for the fourth floor, but he doesn't come any closer.

Skeptical, Natasha doesn't think twice about her next words. "It's not like you two were close. The rest of us can handle it."

With that, she starts up the steps towards Seven, dreading each one of them. Empty boxes await.

"They created an anti-tank missile designed specifically to compromise the Iron Man armor." Tony's voice echoes up to the stairwell. "They lit me on fire. Literally."

Natasha backtracks down the steps to the fourth floor landing. She knew he'd died; had been told that JARVIS attributed it to blunt force trauma – but hadn't known he'd burned inside his suit, before that trauma had spared him.

Shocked and rattled, she doesn't know what to say.

"I shouldn't be here," Tony says, voice wavering and thick with emotion.

It's not until Tony shoves an angry, nostril-flaring breath out of his nose, his eyes red and watering, that Natasha realizes: this is real, genuine Tony Stark. Of course: all the bluster is how he keeps invisible.

All she can think to tell him is, "You're Howard's kid. James always felt indebted to you."

Tony shakes his head, eyes redder. "He's not. Never was."

That's a lie.

"Not now," Tony adds.

Easier said than done, especially now. Barnes is going to wake up furious – and marginalized under the behemoth of another shadow bearing his name. He won't stay here. She knows him well enough to know that.

Without a good idea for how to move forward, Natasha says the first thing that comes to mind. "Whatever you said to him last time, say it again. It worked."

"Sure, whatever." Tony pulls a pair of sunglasses out of somewhere and sticks them on his face. They can hide his eyes but not the emotion shaking his voice. "Count me in."

Tony walks up the rest of the steps, then past her and through the door for Four, headed toward only one person.

That's all well and nice.

Red hot numb, Natasha quickly takes the stairs up to Seven, purposefully strides down the hallway, and bangs into her apartment, so completely unprepared for her own space.

A purposeful smell of lemongrass hangs strongly in the air. An old hint of lavender seeps through the citrus. Lingering even deeper: hair cream, tobacco, gun oil, jet exhaust, and a tinge of medical-grade antibacterial cream.

Natasha shuts the door, leans against it, and slides to the floor. Knees pulled to her chest, she drags her eyes across the room, taking it all in with new eyes.

The ever-growing, neat stacks of his books next to the three bins of her glossy magazines.

A red lotion bottle from Christmas and a crinkled pack of cigarettes on the side table, the lighter somewhere he could never find.

Three of his jackets tossed around – two on the sofa, one on the floor next to a crumpled pair of his ridiculous socks.

Pepsi cans on the coffee table.

An orange medication bottle.

It was all worth it, she tries to tell herself.

***

Steve sits at the steel conference table, at once both nervous and fearless. He feels almost like his old self – but still has the habits and expectations of everything that came after Death Valley. He intends to put that to rest.

"I'd like to start with 'I'm sorry,'" Steve states, eye contact with Maria strong. "It will never happen again."

The Director façade peels away into something that resembles concern. "You can promise that?"

Resolute, genuine confidence dripping from his pores, Steve replies, "I can."

"Because of him?"

With a nod, Steve confirms it: because of Bucky. "I let him make certain…events…never happen."

And he leaves it at that. Later, he'll tell Naceri that he remembers thinking about those events and remembers talking about those events – but that he doesn't remember the actual events happening to him. Not all of them – only the worst ones.

It feels like freedom, like sunlight warming his skin, like breathing after drowning, like solace.

Maria plops her elbows on the table and rubs all ten fingers over her forehead. Not exactly the reaction he'd expected.

Steve is painfully aware of how far their relationship has deteriorated – things said, worse things done. He'd like to move past that. "I'll do whatever Naceri needs to make it official. Whatever you need. If there's a way. If not, I understand."

As if he'd never offered those things, Maria says, "Your body is missing. All of them are missing."

Steve lets that absorb. Silently, he wonders about a possibility, about what happened to the other world. "Huh. That's weird."

Maria leans back, crosses her arms, and allows him a placating smirk. She's back to being the Director. "What'd he do."

With an attempt at a teasing tone, Steve replies, "I get the sense you don't want two of me."

She'd be well within rights to not want even  _one_ of him.

He watches Maria consider a multitude of responses, before she finally settles on something genuine. "I have hundreds of thousands of dead people who are suddenly alive. Every HYDRA base we know about is a  _tree_. We keep finding things he's done – and it's been  _one day_. If you know something, say something."

Steve struggles to keep a positive face. It's a different struggle than it's been for the past two years. "He fixed our messes, Maria. And died for it."

"Ste—"

"He died for it. I don't know what he did beyond that."

Finally, she relents with a stiff nod. "Are there going to be two of you?"

Steve smiles, and, for now, ignores how good it feels. "You'd all better hope not."

He makes to leave, figuring he owes Sam a run and a lunch, and then he can spend the rest of the day vegetating in the medical wing's ICU. Bucky's fighting a fight they all know he'll win, but Steve would rather be nowhere else than by his side.

Maria's voice follows him. "I never expected him to fight for this world."

Steve doesn't pull the punch. "Then you never knew'em."

Steve leaves it at that, headed toward the stairwell and the promise of new days.

He's far enough down the hallway to not hear a door inside Ops click open and another heartbeat to join the pattering of Maria's; to not hear Maria say, "I was wondering when you'd show up"; and to not hear a familiar voice reply, "What in the ever-god-damn-living _fuck_ is going on, Hill?"

***

The thing about "jogging" with Steve is that Steve's idea of "jogging" is  _still_  Sam's idea of a brisk run.

"Dude, I just got back from the dead," Sam wheezes. His thighs burn, calves twitch, lungs ache – but his knee and shoulder feel like they did before 2014. It's more than a good day: they're healed. "This is when you should take it easy."

Effortless, without a drop of sweat on his forehead, Steve shoots Sam an all-out, shiny grin. "This  _is_  easy. What, you want me to walk?"

Yes. Sam will never admit it. So. The trick is to get Steve to stop.

Sam intentionally slows down and speaks his mind. "You sound like you."

Like clockwork, Steve jogs to a dead halt and steps off the concrete path into crispy snow. Elated, Sam follows in kind, waiting to hear some dirt.

"He…" Steve cocks his head side to side. "I am me. And you're alive. You okay with that?"

Sam laughs as he spins in a circle, head tilted toward the gray, winter sky. He doesn't know how to feel about  _any_ of this. "A day ago—a literal  _day_ ago—I'm pushing out on a mission, and, the next second, the entire world has changed. Do you—"

Sam stops himself right there, holds still, and doesn't want to see the look on Steve's face – but he checks.

A smile held back except for the crinkled wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, Steve says, "I'm here, Sam. I get it."

Steve's arm snakes around Sam's neck, then turns it into a full-on hug – and, man,  _never_  ever did he ever expect a hug from no-bleed Steve. Sam returns it, relieved and settled by the support.

Everything is a mess – but everything is okay. It's all okay.

"Don't die again."

"Good advice, man. You should publish that."

Steve flat-out laughs, slap-slaps Sam's back, and pulls away. He's damn near  _glowing_. Sam doesn't know if he's ever known this person, or if it's been so long that he'd forgotten that this version of Steve was idling in the wings.

"Hungry? There's lasagna today. I hear it's good."

Sam could eat.

The Cafeteria isn't serving lasagna, but they do have a nice, hot beef and noodle with mashed potatoes, corn, and a cobbler. It's the perfect comfort food for a winter day.

Steve stacks a couple bowls of potatoes and noodles on top of each other, nabs a few cream-white ramekins of the cobbler, and manages to balance two bottles of soda and a glass of water on top of it all. Somewhere between three weeks and a day ago, Steve was hard-pressed to eat a whole single plate of food from here.

Sam doesn't comment on it, but Steve does. "HYDRA's gone."

They slide their trays onto an empty table near the windows. Outside, fluffy flakes of wet snow trickle through the air. The dormant jet pads collect a sheen of smooth, settled white. For the first time that Sam can remember, the nonstop motion of the base is hushed.

The world is safe, for now. Even SHIELD can savor this day.

"How exactly does that work?" Sam inquires.

Between heaping bites of food, Steve shrugs. "We're gonna find out."

The Steve Rogers that Sam knows would never be okay with that answer: not concrete, not black and white, not actionable.

"I trust him, Sam. I don't know what happened, but I know that."

Now  _that_  sounds like Steve. "Okay."

Another tray sets down onto the table. "Afternoon." Sharon looks pointedly at Sam. "Welcome back."

"Thanks," Sam slowly replies, inching his eyes from her to Steve—who inexplicably just  _keeps eating_ —and then back again.

Sharon never minces words. "That dumbfuck left me four flower boxes. You know what seed packets were inside of them?"

Steve shakes his head. "No, but I got the potting mix, the little shovel, and embarrassing gloves."

Sharon plows forward. "Three kinds of hydrangeas. Narcissus Hydra. Stelis Hydra. You get the idea."

" _God_ ," Sam snorts, "Tony rubbed off on him."

Steve plants his fork in his potatoes and looks like he regrets it immediately. It leaves him without anything to do except talk to Sharon. "Plant some hydras with me later?"

A genuine smile crosses Sharon's face, the kind Sam's seen plenty of times but never with Steve around these days. Three weeks was apparently a long damned time.

"Sure," she replies. "I think that was the idea."

"Wait until you see—" Steve's smartwatch chirps. "—the gloves."

Steve reads the message on his watch and immediately scoots up, tray in his hands. "My turn to hover. I'll be on Four."

Steve goes, and Sam plucks at his food with his fork, daring to raise his eyes at Sharon.

She's already waiting for him. "Not a fucking word, Wilson."

It's good to be back, he guesses.

***

Steve comes as Tony goes, a mutual clap of each other's shoulders sparing words between them.

Inside, Bucky is a far sight better than he'd been down in the operating room: less pale, less bruised, but somehow more relaxed. The strong lavender scent and mellow voice reading an audio book likely explain that.

Still: both of his arms are loaded with IVs and various other medical lines that Steve doesn't recognize. And: he's not breathing on his own.

Hopefully, a part of him is aware enough to know he's safe. Just in case: "Hey, Buck. You're safe. Nat and Sam will be coming by."

A lot of other people, too, but not anyone he's going to know. Not yet, anyway. But he will.

The worst of the damage is covered by a short-sleeved gown. Steve's seen it. "I'm sorry about this. I—"

_Can't believe I did this to you._

That thought is a great way to waste this chance. Steve won't.

"Just know that I'm sorry. And that it gets better."

Steve runs his fingers over the hyperpigmented scar that runs the length of Bucky's left forearm. It's almost exactly like he remembers it from forever and a lifetime ago.

Bucky's eyebrows scrunch together, and his left hand grips an accordioned wad of the blue blanket.

Steve holds his breath, wondering if Bucky is aware enough to realize. After a few moments, his face relaxes, his left knee pulls up, and his head tilts further onto his right shoulder. He's completely and totally out.

Steve dares to turn Bucky's left arm over just far enough, then pushes the gown's short sleeve up just enough to reveal HYDRA's brand burned above a hand-inked prisoner's number. It's his arm, serum and all.

"You're going to be so pissed," Steve breathes.

Until then.

Steve pulls up a chair and takes Bucky's right hand into his left; unlike a few years ago, he carefully avoids disturbing the arterial line.

A lot of today is unlike a few years ago. The others are approaching this like a setback. Steve only sees a massive second chance at life – for both of them.

Steve props his drawing tablet against Bucky's thigh and uses his right hand to sketch freeform – anything that comes to mind.

After completing about half a colorful drawing of Shakespeare Garden on his tablet, and with only three instances of needing to stop Bucky from pulling out IVs and tubes, the door quietly  _clicks_ open and quietly  _clicks_  closed.

Natasha steps inside, her arms crossed and eyes dragging over Bucky. "He looks better. Comfortable. Has he been trying to pull out lines?"

Steve tilts his head back and forth and leans back, sliding his hand out of Bucky's limp one. "A couple times a little while ago. Nothing too bad."

Another tight smile, while her tired eyes reveal doubt – and unmistakable sadness. She sits on the other side of the bed, pretending to be casual enough to kick off her shoes and prop her socked feet up on the mattress, ankles crossed.

"It's not so fair to you," Steve offers.

Her eyes don't leave Bucky's face. "He could hear us last time. I don't want him to hear that."

He's not going to hear that it's not true, Steve thinks to himself. "Fair enough."

The silence that descends between them isn't awkward or comfortable; it just  _is_. Steve sketches, and Natasha sits, the audio book and sounds of medical equipment filling the gaps.

Until.

"After the team fell apart, we sat on the roof. He told me he wanted this life back. I thought we couldn't afford for him to be that weak." As always, Natasha bites the inside of her cheek. "Here we all are. Every one of us."

A laugh bubbles up from somewhere crazy, somewhere deep, and Steve lets it. Whether it's irony or pride or relief or all of the above, it feels good. "I've been trying to tell you all this for years. Including him."

Natasha rolls her eyes at him, before sitting up straight and dropping her feet to the floor. She runs a finger over the burn scar on Bucky's left arm, her head cocked to the side. "I never knew he had this."

"Try to get him to eat spaghetti, and he'll tell you all about it."

That earns a real smile from her.

It's all there. That faded burn scar, from when a pot of boiling spaghetti was nudged off the stove and splashed onto his arm. An ugly, long scar across his bicep, from the jagged half of a whiskey bottle that'd been cracked in half against a bar stool in Brooklyn's shittiest dive. The HYDRA brand above scribbled, black numbers.

"He's gonna be pissed," Steve points out.

Natasha nods, that smile not lasting long. "Having this arm will save his life. Cho and Eicher say it's all gone –everything HYDRA did to make the metal one work. He wanted to live enough to do this."

This counts as seven for her, Steve realizes. Seven times she's grieved him.

"He was dying—and in the best place I'd ever seen." There isn't a shine in her eyes, or a quiver in her voice, or anything that might be misconstrued as a weakness. She smiles again. "And all I can think is 'it's not fair.' Like a child."

Some part of the discussion sinks in for Bucky. His eyebrows pull together and his left fist, still making a wrinkled ball of the non-bleached, blue blanket, squeezes tighter, then tighter, and tighter. He's hunting for the sound of his arm.

Natasha removes her fingers from his arm. "He knows."

Bucky coughs, right hand going for the breathing tube, glazed eyes open – but he's barely there.

Before Steve can do or say anything, Natasha snaps the white bedrail down and sits right next to Bucky, the fingers of her hand brushing into his hair, while her eyes catch Bucky's with easy authority.

"You're safe. Steve is safe. Sam is safe. You're badly hurt, and we're trying to keep you alive. All of this is to keep you alive. You can sleep, James. I'm here."

That easily, his eyes dull, and he blinks and blinks, heavier and heavier, until one of those blinks bleeds into a boneless sleep. His hand drops.

She keeps combing her fingers through his hair, over and over again, light little drags that swirl across his scalp. Mindful of the wires, Natasha pulls her legs up onto the bed and leans into his body.

He'd thought – they'd been convenient for each other, during convenient times. Good for each other, but not serious, not real, a lot like the girlfriends Bucky used to roll through. But. This. The Cosmodrome. Tabernas. It all slides into place.

"You love him."

Natasha doesn't take her eyes from Bucky. "Love is for children."

Steve settles back into his chair and clicks a button to start a new sketch. "Nah. You're just in the wrong business."

He catches her dirty look with a smirk.

***

They say he's been dead for three weeks, but the only things out of place in Sam's apartment are the clean sheets and made-up bed. They hadn't packed him away into boxes. They hadn't even taken him off the mission schedule. Life went on, except for all the ways it hadn't.

Aimless and restless both at once, Sam wanders back into his living room.

Sharon leans against the kitchen door. "What do you need?"

Sam sits on his sofa, back against the cushions, hands in his lap. "What do you need?" is not an easy question to answer.

Sharon sits in the chair across from him, patient in a way that doesn't suit her. Sharon's much more of a "figure it out and let's get going" type person. He needs that more than patience.

He needs another tortuous run with Steve. A sparring session with Nat. A sit-down and pizza with Barnes. One of those things is not like the others.

"Any word on B?"

No one knows who it is that's going to wake up, but they all seem pretty damn sure it'll be someone more than two years behind. Sam doesn't want to believe that—maybe kinda doesn't want to have to live that again.

Sharon shakes her head. "Not yet. He put everything else back together pretty decently, though."

 _Insane_. It's absolutely  _insane_.

"You think it'll be him?"

Sharon shrugs, a tight smile warning him that she's not going there. "I'm here to worry about you. What do you need?"

Still: not an easy question to answer. He figures she can't give him back the life he'd had three-weeks-yesterday ago. "I'm gonna go see my mom tomorrow. Beyond that…"

He shakes his head, searching for anything, anything else to offer her to help with, and it's – "I just want to get back to normal," he admits.

That tight smile of hers turns to bittersweet pity. "I think…all we can ask for is to be happy with what we have. Because we shouldn't have it. You want company on that trip?"

A response on the tip of his tongue, Sam doesn't have a chance to say it.

"Agent Wilson," JARVIS interrupts, "Director Hill asks for you 'to move your damned car from the entryway.'"

Eyebrows scrunched, Sam tries and tries to remember having  _a car_  here. He always uses the company vehicles. "What car? I don't even have  _keys_."

He and Sharon venture to the front of the building, finding a car by the door to the foyer – the one Bruce once threw a Quinjet through. Just as JARVIS said, someone has parked it along the yellow-striped curb, right in front of the "NO PARKING" sign.

Sam's jaw hinges open, eyes disbelieving.

It's his Cruze, the DC plates from 2014, without a scratch or a ding or a single bullet hole. All of the doors are intact. The roof isn't crushed. Inside, the steering wheel is even there – with a red bow wrapped around it.

_Fucking Barnes._

A smile and a laugh die on his lips, as his eyes settle on his old keyring. That old keyring rests on a box of pizza from the best place in Manhattan.

"Is this your car, Sam? I've never seen you drive it."

Sam nods as he leans inside, collects his keys, and picks up the warm pizza box. He closes the door with his foot.

"It's the one B tore apart in DC."

It's funny, how Sharon's expression bleeds from horrific understanding to amused acceptance. "Doesn't look  _that_  bad. You're still moving it, right?"

Sure, he will. Later. Or Maria can have it towed; whichever. In the meantime, Sam raises the pizza box in a beckoning manner.

"Early dinner upstairs?"

Together, they go up to Four, down the hallway to the small ICU, and into a room that Sharon points out. Sam hasn't stopped by yet.

Sam opens the door and spots Natasha on the bed, Steve sketching from a bedside chair, and a very unconscious person listed as "critical." He looks relaxed, at least.

Sam waggles the pizza box, as Sharon saddles up beside him, the door closing behind them. "Hungry?"

"You went to the City?" Steve wonders, appropriately skeptical, that math not working out so well. They'd never have made it back so fast.

Sharon snorts and drops into a cushy fabric chair. "Not quite. Don't eat it all."

That alone is enough to trigger a smile from Steve, once so rare. Sam doesn't ever think seeing that smile will get old.

Natasha sits up and scoots to the edge of the bed, looking none the happier but taking a piece regardless.

Steve tries to take three pieces, until Sam aggressively closes the lid on his hand. Steve zips back to his chair, pretending to be all fucking innocent about it.

Sam leaves the box on an unused tray table, finds the last chair available, plucks the velcro'd TV remote off the wall, and pops on the NFL playoffs. "JARVIS, turn off the book. Thanks."

"Seriously—" someone complains.

Sam's not having it and isn't quite above using his…predicament as leverage. "I've missed three weeks of games. It's Wild Card Weekend."

Despite the collective eyerolling, Sam points at Barnes and then back at himself. "We almost sorta had plans for this."

Without any humor, Natasha disdainfully rolls her eyes. Sam gets it: it's not their Barnes. On the best day, this one's going to be a spectacular asshole jerk and probably want nothing to do with them – like, the aftermath of July on steroids. That's fine.

Sam eats his pizza and watches the game: Indianapolis at Houston, early first quarter.

"Indy made it in," Sharon comments, as if she hadn't been keeping up. "Huh. Didn't expect that."

Sam's been forgetting: the past three weeks have been terrible for them. They hadn't been sitting around watching football. They'd been in comas, on suicide watch, having legs cut off, having seizures, and holding it all somehow together. Comparatively, he'd had it easy.

Barnes' right hand goes for the mass of IVs on his left. Natasha catches that hand, guides it back down, and watches his face, while pizza sauce drips onto the nice blue blanket. Barnes' eyes flicker open, dragging from Natasha to Sharon to Sam.

In appreciation for having his life back, Sam keeps eye contact, takes a bite of pizza, and makes sure to drag the ooey-gooey cheese of the double-stuffed crust into a luscious string of hot mozzarella. "Mmmmm. Stick around for a while, and you can have some."

Barnes stops fighting the sedative and goes back to sleep.

Sour, Natasha presses the call button and tosses a piece of crust into a nearby trash can. "This is real cute, but he's in pain. He needs rest. We're not helping."

Sharon looks ready to argue. Sam thinks about it, but knows –

Ever the leader, Steve stands and snaps his drawing tablet shut. "It's a good point. We take shifts."

As a nurse and Eicher respond to the call, the three of them filter into the bright hallway, the door closing behind them.

Steve swipes crumbs off his hands and steers them true, steadfast and sound. "We've got this. We push forward."

Naturally, Sharon gives him shit. "Aye-aye, Captain."

"I'm not  _Navy_."

Sam loves it – and goes to move his car, before Maria kills him for keeps.

***

Fed up and done, Natasha slides the last box of James' shit into her closet. No one's decided how they're playing this, and, so for now, she hides it all.

Stomach rumbling for a real dinner, she closes the door and takes a step into a carpet of crunchy leaves.

Surrounded by bare-branched, lanky trees, a bright sea of orange kindles over the far horizon. A cool haze of low-hanging fog mists against her face, while the gray-blue sky overhead is nearly in reach. She recognizes this place immediately: Zahirske Reservoir, up on the mountains, where the sunrise burns like fire for miles.

Funny: she'd made most of it up.

"Is this  _really_ your favorite spot?"

That voice – she could listen to him for hours.

She doesn't want this, even as much as she does. "I never said 'favorite.' I'm busy. Take me back."

As easy as that, the mountains vanish, replaced by the sunset rooftop back at base. James is sitting in the same chair as always, in the usual spot, his back to her. The access door beckons, meters to her right.

He's given her an intentional option: sit with him or leave. The only one who counts is seven stories down, two years behind, and a handful of days away from waking up to a nuclear bomb dropping on his life. James had never really been good about doing himself favors.

The only one who counts isn't on this roof, but – she knows, in an indescribable, inexplicable way, that this is the last time she'll ever see this one.

Natasha chooses to sit, and she chooses to stare into the cold, night air. It's a clear night, and, if she squints just right, the lights of Manhattan shine dimly in the far, far distance.

"I'm a jerk," he says, waiting for her to say "no, James, it's  _dick_. You're a  _dick_."

She doesn't want to play that game. "Are you safe?"

His reply isn't too quick. "More or less."

She accepts that, with only a single pang of worry about him. The next question isn't so kind. "Is this what you want?"

He laughs, genuine and loud and amused enough for her to look his way, that old song lighting up the night. His head rests on the back of the chair, eyes focused up on the starlit sky. "It's a little late for that. I don't regret it."

"I'm glad you don't," she replies, overfilling her tone with a too-cool drawl – only in anticipation of the next unkind question. "Did you mess with me?"

This reply comes quickly, without any hesitation or reaction. "I wouldn't do that to you."

"Had to ask. You're a dick."

He rolls his head along the back of the chair, finally meeting her eyes, perfectly inscrutable. "What do you need?"

An explanation. Answers. Him to fix the last piece of the world. She knows better.

 _All of our wasted time back_ , she thinks, tempted to dare him to do it.

"Tell me their story."

Natasha doesn't wait to see his reaction. She closes her eyes and relaxes into her chair, the crisp night air slipping around her. She waits, though not for very long.

"In October 2014, HYDRA found the time stone in an old shipwreck between Miami and Bermuda. They included it in their Tesseract tech, then built and used the helices."

His voice turns dull, mechanical, like a person not wanting to tell this story.

"In 2016, the other us never escaped the Cosmodrome. Tony, Rhodes, and Barton went there, to find you and Sam; they found the helicarrier instead. Tony and Rhodes blew it up; triggered a helix meltdown; and ended the world for anyone not in a shielded HYDRA base. About a month later, our HYDRA found that world and used it. Collected survivors. Finished up Steve."

If it wasn't for Bruce, their Tony and Rhodes would have done the same: destroyed the helicarrier, ended the world. Natasha doesn't know if she should call it luck, an accident, or attribute it to Bruce's skillset. The ugly truth might be somewhere in the middle.

James adds, "If they'd gone there one day earlier, they would've spared Barnes some hard days and nights. He would've appreciated that."

Natasha's sure. And she's sure she doesn't want to hear about that story.

"And how did  _this world_  happen?" she wonders, opening her eyes to look at him. "Explain that."

He shrugs and shifts, slinking down in the seat, hands finding the pockets of his sweater, like always. He's still him, in every way that matters.

 _Stay_  begs to be said.

She won't beg him.

He speaks. "Every time Steve killed him, HYDRA used the time stone to bring him back to life. It might be sentient."

Natasha lifts an eyebrow, settling back into old, comfortable familiarity. "And, by 'might,' you mean…"

"It's sentient. It got attached to him. So, when he asked it to save you, Steve, and Sam, it literally did that. It sent Barton, who asked for you.  _It_  asked for me – and I ended up touching the stupid thing. Once the Cosmodrome went the right way, this world was made. Like, all  _Back to the Future_ with the alternate timelines."

Natasha closes her eyes, and –

"C'mon," James drawls, voice lighting up because he inexplicably  _loves_ dumb science fiction. "Biff Tannen is  _totally_ HYDRA. And Steve's got some Strickland in him. Watch out for that."

Yeah: she's not getting into a  _Back to the Future_ talk with him. Also: she's never seen it.

She begs herself to beg him:  _stay_.

"What happens to you?" she asks instead, willing him to give her an honest, sure answer. "You told Steve you didn't know. Here you are."

James shrugs and slinks even further in the chair, feet kicked out. Although he sighs, his breath doesn't come as white puffs in the chilly air.

"We didn't deserve HYDRA," he says, tone flavored with resentment. "I can see his future. He'll be better than me. He'll love it here, eventually."

She's happy to hear that: really. But: "I asked about  _you_."

"I could die. Have that peace." A smile pulls at his lips and bunches up the apples of his cheeks. "Or – I could have a redo."

He turns his head and looks at her again, eyes more brown than blue. It has to be the lighting, or lack thereof. "Whatdya think?"

She swallows a dry, hard lump in her throat, and shakes her head:  _stay._

He's going to leave, and she still has questions. "Is the other world still there? We haven't been able to get back there. Is that what you're doing? Is that where the other bodies went?"

"You won't be able to get there." He sits up straight and cracks his back, head craned up toward the starlit sky, before standing. "Live a good life. It's gonna be a nice one."

A blink in colossal time, he's gone, leaving behind empty air on a cold winter's night.

***

Steve leans back in an office chair and tosses a large red stress ball up and down. Sitting between a laptop and a microscope, Natasha taps the back of her shoes against Bruce's stainless steel lab table.

Sam and Sharon are off to see Sam's mom, while Rhodes—of all people—is with Bucky. "A quiet place to get work done," Rhodes had explained.

It's nice to have some free time, and it's probably nice for Bucky to actually have a genuinely quiet person let him actually sleep.

"How did Clint and I travel back in time? We went through the blue light – the Tesseract portal. So how?"

Tony's eyebrows nearly reach the ceiling, as he shakes his head at Natasha. "Nope. I have absolutely no explanation for how you ended up back in time there. The portal shouldn't've done that. You should've ended up in an active volcano, or at a Nickelback concert, or wherever cruel hell HYDRA decided to deposit anyone who touched it."

Feeling like a broken record, but also feeling like he has the answer, Steve wonders, "Did Bucky do it?"

Natasha bites her cheek, eyes averted. Still painful.

Tony exhales.

Bruce laughs in a way that sounds like a groan. "I mean, we're already talking infinite regressions – why not? If Thor had stuck around, we could've studied the time stone and had some answers."

"Let it go," Tony grouses, then sing-songs: "Let it go. Let it go!"

Frowning, Bruce notes, "That's a good Elsa impression. One of your best."

"I practice every morning. Ask Pepper."

Partly because he's genuinely curious, and partly because once Tony and Bruce digress like this, they don't usually make it back to the topic, Steve wonders some more, "What's an infinite regression?"

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Tony doesn't wait for Steve to try to answer that. "Same thing. If the 2016 Cosmodrome mission had to change to make this world possible, then how did something that happened  _in our world_  make that change possible?"

Eyebrows knotted, Steve catches the stress ball and sits up. "God."

Tony blinks at him, horrified. "Go back to art school."

"No," Steve argues, as serious as can be, "God's an infinite regression. Right?"

" _You're_ an infinite regression of intelligence," Tony retorts, proving that he's the most mature member of the team. "By the way: next time, try to avoid playing with your boyfriend's altered space-time rocks."

 _Definitely_ the most mature.

"Or. Time isn't linear. Space isn't defined. We like to put things in nice, neat little boxes – but that's not how it works," Bruce states, a reassuring voice in all this. "HYDRA essentially spliced together space and time – anything would be possible, especially directly from the source."

Tony shakes his head with extreme disapproval. "And you call yourself a scientist. You know, I really wish we still had the rock, so we could run some tests. What do you think, Bruce?"

Bruce sighs, somewhere between annoyed and good-natured. "Let it go."

"That's the spirit."

"Anyway. We don't know," Bruce says, having mastered the art of ignoring Tony. "What we do know is that HYDRA perfected the technology. Only two-thirds of Moscow disappeared when the light hit the city."

 _Only_.

Although it's over, although there's no more risk, Steve feels that in his gut like a rock-hard punch. HYDRA had not only tried to recreate Insight: they  _had_ recreated Insight.

"What did it do, exactly?" Steve asks.

After Seattle – no one had told him anything. Being on a mental health hold would do that, he supposes.

Tony answers, "Remember how Barnes was all panty-twisted about HYDRA using their helices to 'reverse time on people'?"

"He was right," Natasha interjects. "They  _were_."

Tony nods slowly, like he's talking to a group of young children. "Yes. And. That's. How. It. Works. You can only go so far back in time, before you never existed. Gotta give'em credit:  _definitely_ less messy than the first Insight."

Steve's stomach drops and flops. All said: he hadn't really wanted to know. As it is, knowing that sucks away all the relief and lightness from the past few days. "We came too close to failing."

"HYDRA's gone," Tony states, part kind, part exasperated. "They're not coming back."

"By the skin of our teeth. And someone else will," Steve contends, silently daring anyone in this room to argue the point. "We need to do better."

Natasha cuts in, changing the subject entirely, before it blows up into another argument. "Barnes is going to wake up, without the arm he's had for seventy years. He's going to struggle, especially if he ends up in combat. Can you two make something?"

It's not a bad idea.

Thoughtful, Bruce nods and already starts tapping away at a keyboard.

"So, you want us to make him a pretend metal arm," Tony clarifies, even as he chews on the corner of his cheek. "Yeah, sure, why not. Repulsors?"

"No one wants repulsors, Tony," Bruce counters, at once both good-natured and distracted. "Will he wear a bracelet?"

Steve looks to Natasha who looks to Steve; between them, they shrug.

"Because, if he will, we already made it."

Steve feels his own jaw drop a bit, so it's nice to see Natasha's unhinge, too.

A Cheshire grin curls up on Tony's face. "Kept trying to tell him – Extremis. Coulda taken the whole arm off, given him a real one, and—"

As if they've choreographed this, Bruce taps a keyboard button, triggers a silver canister to rise from under his work table, and then plucks a small metal box from it.

As Bruce tosses the box to Natasha, Tony finishes his sentence, "—set him up with this. He wouldn't even listen to the elevator pitch. Good luck."

Bruce decides to be marginally more unassuming. "It's nano-tech, like Sam's wings and the Iron Man armor, made of the same material. Same color as he's used to, but we can change that, once he comes around. Nothing will get through it."

Natasha palms the box and hops down off the lab table. "We'll see."

"Is that a threat?" Tony questions. "Sounded like a threat. Do I have to report that?"

As Natasha happily makes to leave, Steve stands up, tosses the stress ball at Bruce, and approaches Tony.

Face to face, eye to eye, Steve says, "Thank you."

 _For being good to him_.

All the bluster put on pause, Tony takes that with a small dip of his head. "I told you I'd take care of him. I meant it. Good to have you back."

In October 2016, Tony's armored hand had wrapped around Steve's upper right arm. He'd let himself be led through the Tower, down some stairs, and into a safe place in the Tower: one where Steve couldn't hurt others, and one where Steve couldn't hurt himself.

Halfway there, inside a stairwell where his voice had thickly echoed, he'd begged, "Take care of him. Please, Tony."

All Steve had needed to hear was, "I will," and Tony had given him that, every day since.

Bruce bounces the stress ball off the tabletop. "We could make it a tattoo instead of a bracelet."

Steve all but forgotten, Tony spins around in his chair and rolls directly to Bruce. "No way to upgrade. But I'm listening."

As Bruce snaps his fingers and rattles off two potential solutions, Steve retreats with Natasha to the stairwell.

It's past lunch time, and so they end up on Six with two trays of food, tucked away into a back-corner table by a window. Outside, it's gray and sleeting, the tree branches sheathed in glistening ice.

Natasha twirls a golden French fry in a wad of red ketchup. "He said we have a good future. That Barnes turns out better."

Steve blows out a breath, something inside untangling – relief, maybe. That's good; real good. "Well. What we know for certain is – no more helicarriers for him."

Natasha doesn't smile, doesn't laugh – only moves her eyes from the window to his face.

"Am I wrong?"

Curious, not angry, Natasha studies him. "Why don't you grieve him?"

Oh. Easy. "Seventy years. Feel the weight of that?"

Steve kindly ignores the rapid shine in her eyes, the tinge of red. He's only ever seen her cry once, and he doesn't want to see it today.

"It was gone. No guilt. No shame. No burden." Steve looks out the window, at the beauty of the ice, the trees, the flurry of hungry birds. "I grieve the one we have. So, I'll give him the best life I can."

In the window's reflection, Natasha runs a finger and a thumb down between her eyes but can't hide a single sniffle, or the deeper set of red.

 _Let James go_ , Steve thinks but would never say. That's not for him.

Business as usual, he spoons mustard out of a metal cup, slathering it onto a grilled chicken sandwich, then borrows a piece of crispy bacon from Natasha's tray.

"Really, though. No more helicarriers."

***

Lavender. Pizza. Stone Temple Pilots.

Barnes drags his eyes open, through the familiar lull and pull of animal-grade sedatives and analgesics. His right arm feels weird, and he briefly raises his head to look at it. It's covered in medical tape, plastic tubes, IV lines, and all sorts of sensors: the usual.

He – he remembers the cosmodrome mission going to hell, remembers Steve in a blood-tinged room with a gun, then yellow-orange lights, and then –

Something scratches at his bare left arm, which means: real skin, real pores, real everything.

He goes light-headed, adrenaline spiking. It's happening again.

He can still think. He still knows his name:  _James Barnes, James Barnes, James Barnes_. He still remembers:  _Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam, Natasha and Sam._

There's a sudden sensation on his right hand. He sees a hazy hand wrapped around his fingers. He blinks and follows the hand to a black-clad shoulder, then to a bare neck, then to a blurry woman's face. Red lips. Red, curly hair.

It's her, again.

Before his throat burns again, before his arm aches again, before he wakes up to a helix machine and its yellow-orange sizzles, he turns his head and regards whatever is pretending to be Anna. "Save them."

His tongue is heavy; lips, cracked; throat, dry. He barely croaks out the words.

"Easy, James. You're safe."

That voice. It's  _Natasha_. It can't be her. It can't be. It's HYDRA, and he's –

"Natasha?"

The blur of her head nods, before her face comes into clarity.

It's god damn fucking  _her_. The adrenaline ebbs away.

He doesn't understand  _how_.

"Nat. I thought…"

He closes his eyes. Wraps his fingers around hers. Can't think around this right now.

"Thought what?"

Barnes thinks about trying to explain, but there's too many words to string together, and he's barely hanging on to consciousness. He doesn't think he has to. "What... Where?"

"You're in SHIELD headquarters. Upstate New York."

It must be the drugs, because it takes him what feels like long, elastic minutes to wrap his brain around that.

"I didn't know you had that," Barnes says and tries to look around. He ends up finding a much more comfortable spot on the pillow, and he keeps his head there. Almost afraid to know, he asks, "Steve?"

"He's here."

Relief eviscerates the last dregs of that adrenaline. Steve's here, and Steve's safe. It's all that matters.

"Tell'em we're square," he mumbles, as sedatives drag him toward sleep.

"Tell me yourself."

That voice is a dream. It's not the same voice from that room. It's the voice from his childhood, from adulthood, from the War, from a highway bridge and a helicarrier, from a moment in Poland and from a thousand memories.

Barnes looks toward that voice, blinking and blinking and blinking to keep his eyes  _open_.

He sees Steve's face, closer than he expected. He looks good, healthy, whole. Barnes wonders how long he's been asleep, but that's not nearly as important as: "You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah. It's a long story. Get some sleep, Buck. I'll be here."

He sees Steve smile, and he feels Steve's hand on his left leg, and, yeah, sleep, it's pulling harder and harder. He closes his eyes and sinks, almost forgetting to tell Steve, "We're fucking square."

Barnes drifts further and further down, chased by the sweet, sweet echoes of Steve laughing, not in a time long past, but this one.

***

The end.

/***/

In Porto Torres, a man five years dead walks down a road laid with gray pavers and lined by planters filled with colorful summer flowers. Beyond the beige stucco buildings, the sea smells of salt, fish, and sand.

He hasn't smelled the sea in a decade.

"Michela is the same age as you remember," a male voice from behind says.

Andrea Nazarri turns to address the man. It's James Barnes, HYDRA's Winter Soldier: hands in pockets like an American, shoulders relaxed like a person not here to kill, eyes focused and sharp.

"It never happened."

Andrea glances at a magazine rack. All the issues are dated 2003. His eyes well, and he asks the only sensible question. "You can do that?"

Barnes stands perfectly still. "You gave me a chance. This is yours."

"Nonnino!"

Andrea inhales sharply, then holds that breath. The smell of the sea, the sound of that voice, and the  _creak-creak-creak_  of a bicycle frame – all of it, impossibilities. He glances over his shoulder and sees dark brown hair, chocolate eyes, and chipped pink fingernails.

An over-the-shoulder glance is barely enough. He twists fully around and kneels to her level, arms spread ready and wide for a hug. "My Micheluccia!"

From that point forward, Andrea Nazarri only knows of James Barnes from the history books and only of HYDRA from the news stories, another ghost put to rest.

//***//

Smooth pebbles  _crunch-crunch_  under feet not trying to step quietly. Barnes recognizes the walking pattern as Sam's and doesn't move position.

Under the sleeve of a black jacket, he silently flexes his left arm, then digs his fingernails into his fleshy left palm. It's a disadvantage he can't afford: a weakness, a liability, a limb twice lost.

A few hundred meters behind him, sitting outside the dark blue safe house, Natasha and Steve idly chat. Their voices carry into a familiar timbre, words indistinct, unimportant: disintegrating into the rhythmic, white-capped surf that rushes against the rocky shore.

It's been two weeks since two years ago and only three days since he'd fled their headquarters, boarded a passenger plane, and found those two and Sam waiting outside the destination airport.

"You could've asked for a jet," Steve had mentioned. "Saved yourself some hours. Hungry?"

Apparently, he could ask for anything, except for them to leave him the hell alone. Somehow, for some reason, he lets himself be here: a coastal, overcast village called Hamningberg, near the top of the world, ringed by round, brown mountains.

He lets them watch him, dote on him, patronize him. Biding time until he's physically able to effectively go to ground, he tells himself.

Too tired to fight them and not really needing to, he knows.

He doesn't need to. A voice not unlike his own tells him  _they're your home_.

Sam sits down and inexplicably hands him a silver MRE package, already opened. It's something like pizza, and then something less, when a FreshPax "DO NOT EAT" packet falls out of the sleeve.

Barnes takes the package but turns an annoyed, puzzled look onto Sam. "We ate an hour ago. And… no."

A smile leads to a coughed out laugh. "I gave you one of these. You told me about Charlie-rats and paper labels. We sat in the rain, and you told me that you were afraid of remembering things."

Barnes drops the package on the snow-capped, pebbled ground and doesn't try to mask his sigh. Sam's talking about another shadow of another person he'll never be.

He wishes they hadn't found him. Hadn't convinced him to come here, not for fucking  _this_.

"It's when I realized we were friends. I wish you'd lived it."

Barnes clenches his left fist, fingernails again digging into flesh. That shoulder itches, as phantom pain worms around his shoulder blade to his chest. "'Kay."

He stares out over the blue-gray water: watching the winter waves cascade toward the shore, listening to their harsh roar, all of it so much bigger than himself. When he closes his eyes, it's almost like it could carry him away. Maybe it could.

"You're gonna have to buy deodorant more often now."

Barnes lets another sigh go, and he gives Sam a cautionary look.

Sam's far less intimidated by him than Barnes remembers. "Not sure how that's gonna fit into your hair product budget. Might be tight, man."

Under the weight of everything—Jesus god damn Christ,  _everything_ from the past two-weeks-actually-two-years—that's not funny. The way Sam's smirk eats shit says it should be.

 _Whatever_.

"Where next?" Barnes wonders.

"Kiruna, then a train to Stockholm. Only nineteen hours."

Nineteen hours in a train cabin with these three. It sounds abso-fucking-lutely  _terrible_. Maybe that's their plan: irritate him until he gives in and goes back to their headquarters.

It'll probably work.

"Look…we have no idea what we're doing," Sam says, always direct, exactly as Barnes remembers. But, really: so much less intimidated. "We don't want to lose you. Tell us what to do."

Everything—all of this—alone's enough to suffocate him, a crushing weight on his chest.  _He_ doesn't know what to do.

"B?"

"Don't call me that." Barnes picks up the MRE pizza and tosses it back to Sam. "Not a great start."

Sam hides a flicker of hurt with a smile, then pats Barnes' back and leaves his hand there.

That's okay.

It can all be okay.

///***///

The year was 1945; the month, September. The War had been won for three weeks; Steve, lost for four months.

Bucky poured steaming amber-colored coffee from a dented, aluminum pot into two chipped ceramic cups. Those cups balanced in his hands, he walked up a set of rickety, wooden steps. His body swayed with the rocking of the boat, not a drop of coffee spilt.

On the trawl deck, he handed a cup to Carter. Her hands wrapped in thick gloves, her face nothing but mascara-tipped eyes, a chilled-red nose, and layers of gray wool that smelled of Virginia tobacco, she took it with an appraising look directed at him.

"You truly think he's here," she said, somewhere between a question and a judgment.

He felt as nuts as she made him sound. "I know he's here."

He couldn't explain it any better than that: a sure, cool knowledge, not something he understood - but also not something he feared.

Bucky rested his bare elbows on the metal deck rail and leaned out over the endless expanse of dark blue water. White chunks of ice bobbed past the hull, while white puffs of his warm breath sunk into the frigid, dry air.

He took a long drink of his already-cold coffee and appreciated the deep red sunset; no storm on the horizon tonight.

Carter joined him at the rail, her back pressed into it. "You haven't been sleeping."

It would take longer than three weeks to put the War behind him - behind all of them. It'd take more than finding Steve's body.

Thing is: home died with Steve. The SSR was his only future, and Carter wasn't exiting his life anytime soon. No sense in dodging her, not anymore.

"Dreams," he admitted, without mentioning Krausberg, or the deep holes filled with people made of blackened skin and marbled veins, or the little girl with a dud grenade, or the rotted men who densely carpeted barbwire battlefields.

"Can't imagine why," she offered, a gentle sarcasm clearly registering. "He would appreciate this, you know."

Bucky slowly poured his coffee into the ocean and smiled. "No, he wouldn't. He'd say there's more important things to do. He'd be right."

Hydra didn't end with Schmidt, not if the Soviets had anything to say about it. Even in custody, Zola remained a threat, liable to be Paperclipped by the JIOA - something Bucky shouldn't know about, but what the hell. All the politics of the War were still shaking out, upending an already-upended world into one he barely wanted to recognize.

Beyond that, he hadn't yet gone home to see his family. He hadn't seen his parents or little brothers for years, or Becca for nearly a year. He missed them more than he ever would've imagined.

 _Family's important, Buck_ , Steve would've said.  _You won't always have them._

The only answer to that would be,  _You're family. You're coming home_.

Carter pulled down her wool scarf and returned his smile, lips painted red; that smile was an odd rarity, something else he barely recognized. "Perhaps."

Quick, heavy footsteps clomped across the deck. Carter glanced that way, as Bucky turned full around and saw Dugan trotting at them.

"Hey! Stark has something on ASDIC!" A grin curled under Dugan's mustache. "We're dropping anchor."

Coffee sloshed over the rim of Carter's cup and splashed onto the wooden slats of the deck. She slid a quick hand under the cup's bottom, bracing it against her rattled shock.

Dropping anchor was a big deal. A "Steve's here" big deal. There was no doubt, none at all, in his mind.

Silently, Bucky took a deep, steadying breath, excitement turning to relief turning to regret, a precursor to the grief that he knew would come with the finality of seeing Steve's body.

Dugan looked Bucky twice over. "Would you put a fucking coat on? Just to pretend? We're in the fucking Arctic.  _Sir_."

Bucky gave Dugan an obliging dirty look, sharp words lost to his swirling thoughts and aching gut.

"Let's see, shall we," Carter said. She walked toward Dugan, who waited patiently for Bucky to make a move, to catch up.

"Go. I'll be there."

Dugan hesitated for only a moment. Then, Dugan lifted a bent arm for Carter to take, half to appease ingrained chivalry, half to piss her off.

"Oh, please," she bit and walked straight past him. "Contain yourself, would you."

Bucky turned back around, arms braced on the rail, and stared into the blue water.

 _You're down there_.

_I wasn't there for you._

The War was never supposed to have touched Steve. Instead, it'd taken his life. This was the least Bucky could do: find him, take him home to Brooklyn, bury him next to his folks.

Resolved to do that, Bucky pushed off the rail and took a step after Dugan and Carter, toward the bridge deck. Without knowing why, he stopped after that step and turned back around, facing the stern.

The coffee cup dropped from his hand, bounced once, and rolled in a half circle along its rim. He didn't notice.

Lightheaded, an unknowing observer of his own life, he took step after step after step toward the back end of the ship.

Warm, bare hands wrapped around the icy rail, he stared far, far across the water, hundreds of kilometers away. With someone else's eyes, he saw through dark, sunless depths and found a vividly blue, square cube.

Ancient and infinite, it whispered to him:  _find me_. For a moment, only a moment, his eyes burned with transient yellow-orange.

All in good time.

© 2019

llethee (at) gmail (dot) com

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Musical inspiration: "Cold Little Heart" by Michael Kiwanuka (this song seriously got me to the end of this series) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOubjLM9Cbc)
> 
> Thank you for reading this far and for following along through the madness. I truly appreciate every comment, kudos, subscription, bookmark - and, most of all, your readership. Thanks for being here.
> 
> And it's done.


End file.
